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Writers

work

'The Paris Review* interviews

'W RITERS J^T 'W O R K

NfRRCURY BOOKS
NO 2 9

MERCURY BOOKS

1. FRED HOYLE Frontiers of Astronomy

2. D. H. LAWRENCE Selected Literary Criticism
(Ed.) Anthc^i^ftal

3. A. c. CROMBIE Avgustine to
4i. Awc. CROMBIE Ai^ustine to Galileo vol ii
5. LIONEL TRILLING The Liberal Imagination
6. j. L. TALMON The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
7. j. M. KEYNES Essays in Biography

8. THOMAS MANN Stories of a Lifetime: The Complete

Stories vol i

9. THOMAS MANN Stories of a Lifetime: The Complete

Stories vol i i

10. PETER F. DRUCKER The Practice of Management
11. JAMES REEVES The Idiom of the People
12. JOHN CARTER A.B.C.foT Book CollectoTS
13. w. I. B. BEVERIDGE The Art of Scientific Investigation
14. GIORGIO DE SANTiLLANA The Crime of Galileo
15. GRAHAM GREENE Three Plays

16. JOMO KENYATTA Fociug Mount Kenya

17. GEORGE ORWELL The Collected Essays

18. LESLIE HOTSON The First Night of Twelfth Night
19. MORRIS GINSBERG On The Diversity of Morals
20. s. A. BARNETT A Ceutwry of Dc&win
21. J. L. CLIFFORD Toung Samuel Johnson
22. JACQUES BARZUN The House of Intellect
23. NORMAN COHN The PuTstUt of the Millennium
24. HENRY JAMES The House of Fiction

General Editor alan hill

WRITERS AT WORK

THE

Paris Review

INTERVIEWS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Malcolm Cowley

MERCURY BOOKS
LONDON

First Published in Mercury Books
1912

^ publication of

THE HEINEMANN CROUP OF PUBLISHERS

15—16 Queen Street ^ Ijondon fV\

Printed in England by
A. Wheaton & Co., Ejceter

Contents

Introduction

Page 7

E. M. Forster

FRANgois Mauriac

Joyce Cary

Dorothy Parker

James Thurber

Thornton Wiu>er

WnjLZAM Faoulner

109

Georges Simenon

129

Frank O’Connor

145

Robert Penn Warren

165

Alberto Moravia

187

Nelson Algren

2X17

Angus Wilson

225

William Styron

239

Truman Capote

253

FRAN901SE Sagan

269

Introduction

How Writers Write

Tbis is the best series of interviews with writers of our time
that I have read in English. The statement, though swe^ing, isn t
quite so eulogistic as it sounds. As compared with Continental
Europeans, the English since Boswell, who was Scottish, and the
Americans from the beginning have seldom been good at literary
interviews. Everything in their badcground has been against the
development of the form. Editors haveq t been willing to give it
much space because of a probably justified feeling that their
public was not interested in literary problems. Authors have been
embarrassed or reticent, often at the wrong places, and inter-
viewers by and large have been incompetent. 1 can think of recent
exceptions, but most of the interviewers either have had no serious
interest in literature or else have been too serious about them-
selves. Either they have been reporters with little knowledge of
the author s work and a desire to entrap him into making scanda-
lous remarks about sex, politics, and Cod, or else they have been
ambitious writers trying to display their own sophistication,
usually at the expense of the author, and listening chiefly to their
own voices.

In this book the literary conversations are of a different order,
perhaps because of the changing times. The interviewers belong
to a new generation that has been called “silent,” though a better
word for it would be “waiting" or “listening” or “inquiring.” They
have done their assigned reading, they have asked ^e right ques-
tions, or most of them, and have listened carefully to the answers.
The authors, more conscious of their craft than authors used to
be, have talked about it with an engaging lack of stufiBness. The

WRITERS AT WORK

editors of The Paris Review have been generous with their time
and space, and the result is a series that seems to me livelier and
more revealing than others of its kind. Unlike most of the others
it is concerned primarily with the craft of fiction. It tells us what
fiction writers are as persons, where they get their material, how
they work from day to day, and what they dream of writing.

The series started with the first issue of The Paris Review in the
spring of 1754. The new quarterly had been founded by young
men lately out of college who were in Europe working on their
first novels or books of poems. Their dream of having a magazine
of their very own must have been more luminous than their
pictiu-e of what it should be, yet they did have a picture of sorts.
They didn’t want their magazine to be “little" or opinionated
{engagSy in the slang of the year) or academic. Instead of printing
what were then the obligatory essays on Moby Dick and Henry
James’s major phase, they would print stories and poems by new
authors — and pay for them too, as long as the magazine kept
going. They wanted to keep it going for a long time, even if its
capital was only a thousand dollars, with no subventions in sight.
They dreamed that energy and ingenuity might take the place of
missing resources.

At this point The Paris Review took a different direction from
that of other magazines published by Americans in Europe. Like
them it wanted to present material that was new, uncommercial,
“making no compromise with the public taste,” in the phrase
sanctified by the Little Review, but unlike the others it was willing
to use commercial devices in getting the material printed and
talked about. “Enterprise in the service of art” might have been
its motto. The editors compiled a list, running to thousands of
names, of Americans living in Paris and sent volunteer salesmen
to ring their doorbells. Posters were printed by hundreds and
flying squadrons of three went out by night to paste them in likely
and unlikely places all over the city. In June 1757 the frayed rem-
nants of one poster were still legible on the ceiling of the lavatory
in the Caf^ du Ddme.

The series of interviews was at first regarded as another device
— ^more dignified and perhaps more effective too — ^for building
circulation. The magazine needed famous names on the cover, but
couldn’t afford to pay for the contributions of famous authors. “So
let’s talk to them," somebody ventured — ^it must have been Peter

INTRODUCTION

Matthiessen or Harold Humes, since they laid the earliest plans
for the Review — “and print what they say." The idea was dis-
cussed with George Plimpton, late of the Harvard Lampoon, who
had agreed to editor. Plimpton was then at King’s College,
Cambridge, and he suggested E. M. Forster, an honorary fellow
of King’s, as the first author to be interviewed. It was Forster him-
self who gave a new direction to the series, making it a more
thoughtful discussion of the craft of fiction than had at first been
planned. Forster began by saying that he would answer questions
if they were given to him in advance so that he could brood over
them. The questions were submitted, and a few days later when
the interviewers appeared, Forster gave his answers so methodi-
cally and slowly that his guests had no trouble keeping up with
him. It was a simple interview to transcribe, and it furnished the
best of patterns for the series that followed.

Interviewers usually worked in pairs, like FBI agents. Since no
recording equipment was available for the interviews, they both
jotted down the answers to their questions at top speed and
matched the two versions afterwards. With two men writing, the
pace could be kept almost at the level of natural conversation.
Some of the later interviews — with Frank O’Connor, for example
— were done with a tape recorder. After two or three sessions the
interviewers typed up their material; then it was cut to length,
arranged in logical order, and sent to the author for his approval.
Sometimes he took a special interest in the text and expanded it
with new questions of his own. There were important additions to
some interviews, including those with Mauriac, Faulkner, and
Moravia, whHe this volume was being edited.

It seems strange that famous authors should have devoted so
much of their time to a project from which they had nothing to
gain. Some of them disliked the idea of being interviewed but
consented anyway, either out of friendship for someone on the
Review or because they wanted to help a struggling magazine of
the arts, perhaps in memory of their own early struggles to get
published. Others — notably Simenon, Cary, Warren, and O’Con-
nor— were interested in the creative process and glad to talk about
it. Not one of the interviewers had any professional experience in
the field, but perhaps their inexperience and youth were positive
advantages. Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all
the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.

WRITERS AT WORK

“Kind” in this case means honest and painstaking in one’s own
fashion. Rereading the interviews, this time as a group, I was
impressed by the extreme diversity of the characters and talents
they present. The sixteen authors have come frem the ruling class,
the middle class, or the working class of five different countries.
They are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or agnostic; old or young;
married, single, or divorced; and they have had all sorts of educa-
tion, from those who never finished secondary school (Simenon,
Faulkner) to those who are university professors or fellows. One
started life as a gunman, another as a bindle stiff, another as a
soldier and government official; several went straight into profes-
sional writing. All have strongly marked personalities which are
revealed — asserted, one might say — in their simplest remarks, and
no personality resembles any other. Yet in spite of their diversity,
w'hat emerges from the interviews is a composite picture of the
fiction writer. He has no face, no nationality, no particular back-
ground, and I say “he” by grammatical convention, since two of
the authors are women; but they all have something in common,
some attitude towards life and art, some fund of common experi-
ence. Let us see how they go about their daily ta.sk of inventing
stories and putting them on paper.

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a
story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or
less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the re-
vision, which may be simply “pencil work,” as John O’Hara calls
it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing
several drafts and what amounts to a new work.

The germ of a story is something seen or heard, or heard about,
or suddenly remembered; it may be a remark casually dropped at
the dinner table fas in the case of Henry James’s story. The Spoils
of Poynton), or again it may be the look on a stranger’s face. Al-
most always it is a new and simple element introduced into an
existing situation or mood; something that expresses the mood
in one sharp detail; something that serves as a focal point
for a hitherto disorganized mass of remembered material in
the author’s mind. James describes it as “the precious par-
ticle . . . the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague
echo, at a touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as
at the prick of some sharp point,” and he adds that “its virtue is

INTRODUCTION

all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as
possible.”

In the case of one story by the late Joyce Cary, the "precious
particle” was the, wrinkles on a young woman’s forehead. He had
seen her on the little boat that goes around Manhattan Island, “a
girl of about thirty,” he says, "wearing a shabby skirt. She was
enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a
good many wrinkles. I said to my friend, ‘I could write about that
girl . . .’” but then he forgot her. Three weeks later, in San Fran-
cisco, Cary woke up at four in the morning with a story in his
head — a purely English story with an English heroine. When he
came to revise the story he kept wondering, “Why all these
wrinkles? That’s the third time they come in. And I suddenly
realized,” he says, “that my English heroine was the girl on the
Manhattan boat. Somehow she had gone down into my subcon-
scious, and came up again with a full-sized story.”

The woman with the wrinkled forehead could hardly have
served as the germ of anything by Frank O’Connor, for his imagi-
nation is auditive, not visual. “If you’re the sort of person,” he
says, “that meets a girl in the street and instantly notices the
colour of her eyes and of her hair and the sort of dress she’s wear-
ing, then you’re not in the least like me I have terribly sensitive

hearing and I’m terribly aware of voices.” Often his stories develop
from a remark he has overheard. That may also be the case with
Dorothy Parker, who say a, “1 haven’t got a visual mind. I hear
things.” Faulkner does have a visual mind, and he says that The
Sound and the Fury “began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize
at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat
of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through
a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and
report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below.
By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing
and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible
to get all of it into a short story and it would have to be a book.”
At other times the precious particle is something the author has
read — preferably a book of memoirs or history or travel, one that
lies outside his own field of writing. Robert Penn Warren says, “I
always remember the date, the place, the room, the road, when
I first was struck. For instance. World Enough and Time. Kath-
erine Ann Porter and I were both in the Library of Congress as

WRITERS AT WORK

fellows. We were in the same pew, had offices next to each other.
She came in one day with an old pamphlet, the trial of Beauchamp
for killing Colonel Sharp. She said, ‘Well, Red, you better read
this.’ There it was. I read it in five minutes. B<it I was six years
making the book. Any book I write starts with a flash, but takes
a long time to shape up.”

The book or story shapes up — assumes its own specific form,
that is — during a process of meditati'^n that is the second stage in
composition. Angus Wilson calls it “the gustatory period” and says
that it is "ver)' important to me. That's when I’m persuading my-
self of the truth of what I want to say, and I don't think I could
persuade my readers unless I’d persuaded myself first.” The period
may last for years, as with Warren’s novels (and most of Henry
James’s), or it may last exactly two days, as in the extraordinary
case of Georges Simenon. “.\s soon as I have the beginning,"
Simenon explains, “I can’t bear it very long. . . . And two days
later I begin writing.” The meditation may be, or seems to be,
wholly conscious. "The writer asks himself questions — “What
should the characters do at this point? How can I build to a
climax?” — and answers them in various fashions before choos-
ing the final answers. Or most of the process, including all
the early steps, may be carried on without the writer’s voli-
tion. He wakes before daybreak witli the whole story in his
head, as Joyce Caiy' did in San Francisco, and hastily writes
it down. Or again — and I think most frequently — the meditation
is a mixture of conscious and unconscious elements, as if a cry
from the depths of sleep were being heard and revised by the
waking mind.

Often the meditation continues while the writer is engaged in
other occupations; gardening, driving his wife to town (as Walter
Mitty did), or going out to dinner. “I never quite know whe.n I’m
not writing,” says James Thurber. “Sometimes my wife comes up
to me at a dinner party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, slop writing.'
She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my
daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’
‘No,’ my wife says, ‘he’s writing.’ I have to do it that way on
acexjunt of my eyes.” When Thurber had better vision he u.sed to
do his meditating at the typewriter, as many other writers do.
Nelson Algren, for example, finds his plots simply by writing page
after page, night after night. “I always figured,” he says, “the only

INTRODUCTION 13

way I could finish a book and^get a plot was just to keep making
it longer and longer until something happens.”

The first draft of a story is often written at top speed; probably
that is the best way to write it Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who is
not among the authors interviewed, once compared the writing of
a first draft with skiing down a steep slope diat she wasn't sure
she was clever enough to manage. "Sitting at my desk one morn-
ing,” she says, "I ‘pushed off’ and with a tingle of not altogether
pleasurable excitement and alarm, felt myself ‘going.’ I ‘went’
almost as precipitately as skis go down a long white slope, scrib-
bling as rapidly as my pencil could go, indicating whole words
with a dash and a jiggle, filling page after page with scrawls.”
Frank O’Connor explains the need for haste in his own case. ‘‘Get
black on white,” he says, "used to be Maupassant’s advice — that’s
what I always do. I don’t give a hoot what the writing’s like, I
write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the
story, then I can begin to see it.” There are other writers, however,
who work ahead laboriously, revising as they go. William Styron
says, “I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each para-
graph— each sentence, even — as I go along.” Dorothy Parker
reports that it takes her six months to do a story: “I think it out
and then write it sentence by sentence — no first draft. I can’t write
five words but that I change seven.”

O’Connor doesn’t start changing words until the first draft is
finished, but then he rewrites, so he says, “endlessly, endlessly,
endlessly.” There Ls no stage of composition at which these authors
differ more from one another than in this final stage of preparing
a manuscript for the printer. Even that isn’t a final stage for
O’Cyonnor. “I keep on rewriting,” he says, “and after it’s published,
and then after it’s published in book form, I usually rewrite it
again. I’ve rewritten versions of most of my early stories, and one
of these days. Cod help. I’ll publish these as well.” Fran9oise
Sagan, on the other hand, spends “very little” time in revision.
Simenon spends exactly three days in revising each of his short
novels. Most of that time is devoted to tracking down and crossing
out the literary touches — “adjectives, adverbs, and every w'ord
which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is
there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sen-
tence-cut it.” Joyce Cary was another deletionist. Many of the
passages he crossed out of his first drafts were those dealing

WRITERS AT WORK

explicitly with ideas. “I work over the whole book,” he says, “and
cut out anything that does not belong to the emotional develop-
ment, the texture of feeling.” Thurber revises his stories by re-
writing them from the beginning, time and again. “A story I’ve
been working on,” he says, “. . . was rewritten fifteen complete
times. There must have been close to two hundred and forty
thousand words in all the manuscripts put together, and I must
have spent two thousand hours working at it. Yet the finished
story can’t be more than twenty thousand words.” That would
make it about the longest piece of fiction he has written. Men like
Thurber and O’Connor, who rewrite “endlessly, endlessly,” find
it hard to face the interminable prospect of writing a full-length
novel.

For short-story writers the four stages of composition are usually
distinct, and there may even be a fifth, or rather a first, stage. Be-
fore seizing upon the germ of a story, the writer may find himself
in a state of “generally intensified emotional sensitivity . . . when
events that usually pass unnoticed suddenly move you deeply,
when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door
throws you into a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in
a child’s eyes moves you to tears.” I am quoting again from
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who “cannot conceive,” she says, “of
any creative fiction written from any other beginning.” There is
not much doubt, in any case, that the germ is precious largely
because it serves to crystallize a prior state of feeling. Then comes
the brooding or meditation, then the rapidly written first draft,
then the slow revision; for the story-writer everything is likely to
happen in more or less its proper order. For the novelist, however,
the stages are often confused. The meditation may have to be
repeated for each new episode. The revision of one chapter may
precede or follow the first draft of the next.

That is not the only difference between writing a short story
and writing a novel. Reading the interviews together, I was con-
firmed in an old belief that the two forms are separate and that
mere length is not their distinguishing feature. A long short story
— say of forty thousand words — is not the same as a novel of forty
thousand words, nor is it likely to be written by the same person.
Among the authors interviewed, the division that goes deepest is
not between older and younger writers, or men and women

INTRODUCTION

writers, or French and English writers; it is the division between
those who think in terms of the short story and those who are
essentially novelists.

Truman Capote might stand for those who think in terms of
the short story, since he tells us that his “more unswerving ambi-
tions still revolve around this form.” A moment later he says, “I
invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start
and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously — ^that
I'm seeing it in one flash.” He likes to know the end of a story
before writing the first word of it. Indeed, he doesn’t start writing
until he has brooded over the story long enough to exhaust his
emotional response to the material. ‘T seem to remember reading,”
he says, “that Dickens, as he wrote, choked with laughter over his
own humour and dripped tears all over the page when one of his
characters died. My own theory is that the writer should have
considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out
to evoke similar reactions in a reader.” The reactions of the reader,
not of the writer, are Capote’s principal concern.

For contrast take the interview with Simenon, who is a true
novelist even if his separate works, written and revised in about
two weeks, are not much longer than some short stories. Each of
them starts in the same fashion. “It is almost a geometrical prob-
lem,” he says. “I have such a man, such a woman, in such sur-
roundings. What can happen to them to oblige them to go to their
limit? That’s the question. It will be sometimes a very simple
incident, anything which will change their lives. 'Then I write my
novel chapter by chapter.” Before setting to work Simenon has
scrawled a few notes on a big manila envelope. The interviewer
asks whether these are an outline of the action. “No, no,” Simenon
answers. “. . . On the envelope I put only the names of the charac-
ters, their ages, their families. I know nothing whatever about the
events which will occur later. Otherwise” — ^and I can’t help put-
ting the statement in italics — "it would not be interesting to me.”

Unlike Capote, who says that he is physically incapable of
writing anything he doesn’t think will be paid for (though I take
it that payment is, for him, merely a necessary token of public
admiration), Simenon would “certainly,” he says, continue writing
novels if they were never published. But he wouldn’t bother to
write them if he knew what the end of each novel would be, for
then it would not he interesting, ^e discovers his fable not in one

WRITERS AT WORE

flash, but chapter by chapter, as if he were telling a continued
story to himself. "On the eve of the first day,” he says, "I know
what will happen in the first chapter. Then day after day, chapter
after chapter, I find what comes later. After I have started a novel
I write a chapter each day, without ever missing a day. Because it
is a strain, I have to keep pace with the novel. If, for example, I
am ill for forty-eight hours I have to throw away the previous
chapters. And I never return to that novel.” Like Dickens he lets
himself be moved, even shattered, by what he is writing. "All the
day,” he says, “I am one of my characters”— always the one who
is driven to his limit. "I feel what he feels. . . . And it’s almost
unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons why
my novels are so short; after eleven days I can’t — it’s impossible.
I have to It’s physical, I am too tired.”

Nobody else writes in quite the same fashion as Simenon. He
carries a certain attitude towards fiction to the further point that
it can be carried by anyone who writes books to be published and
read. But the attitude in itself is not unusual, and in fact it is
shared to some extent by all the true novelists who explain their
methods in this book. Not one of them starts by making a scene-
by-scene outline, as Henry James did before writing each of his
later novels. James had discovered what he called the "divine prin-
ciple of the Scenario” after writing several unsuccessful plays, and
in essence tlie principle, or method, seems to be dramatistic rather
than novelistic. The dramatist, like the short-story writer, has to
know where he is going and how he will get there, scene by scene,
whereas all the novelists interviewed by The Paris Review are
accustomed to making voyages of exploration with only the
roughest of maps. Mauriac sa}'s, "There is a point of departure,
and there are some characters. It often happens that the first
characters don’t go any further and, on the other hand, vaguer,
more inconsistent characters show new possibilities as the story
goes on and assume a place we hadn’t foreseen.” Fran^oise Sagan
says that she has to start writing to have ideas. In the beginning
she has “a character, or a few characters, and perhaps an idea for
a few of the scenes up to the middle of the book, but it all changes
in the writing. For me writing is a question of finding a certain
rhythm.” (One thinks of Simenon and his feeling that he has to
keep pace with the novel.) "My work,” says Moravia, "... is not
prepared beforehand in any way. I might add, too, that when Tm

INTRODUCTION

not working I don’t think of my work at alL” Forster does lay plans
for his work, but they are subject to change. "The noveUsC" he
says, "should, I think, always settle when he starts what is going
to happen, what jps major event is to be. He may alter this event
as he approaches it, indeed he probably will, indeed he probably
had better, or the novel becomes tied up and tight. But die sense
of a solid mass ahead, a mountain round or over whidi or through
which the story must go, is most valuable and, for the novels I’ve

tried to write, essentid When I began A Passage to India I

knew that something important happened in the Malabar Caves,
and that it would have a central place in the novel — but I didn’t
know what it would be.’’

Most novelists, one might generalize on this evidence, are like
the chiefs of exploring expeditions. They know who their com-
panions are (and keep learning more about them); they know
what sort of territory they will have to traverse on the following
day or week; they know the general object of the expedition, the
mountain they are trying to reach, the river of which they are try-
ing to discover the source. But they don't know exactly what tbeir
route will be, or what adventures they will meet along the way,
or how their companions will act when pushed to the limit. They
don’t even know whether the continent they are trying to map
exists in space or only within themselves. “1 think that if a man
has the urge to be an artist,’’ Simenon muses, “it is because he
needs to &nd himself. Every writer tries to find himself through
his characters, through all his writing.” He is speaking for ti^e
novelist in particular. Short-story writers come back from tiheir
briefer explorations to brood over the meaning of their discoveries;
then they perfect the stories for an audience. The short story is an
exposition; the novel is often and perhaps at its best an inquisition
into the unknown depths of the novelist’s mind.

Apparently the hardest problem for almost any writer, whatever
his medium, is getting to work in the morning (or in the afternoon,
if he is a late riser like Styron, or even at night). Thornton Wilder
says, "Many writers have told me that they have built up
mnemonic devices to start them off on each day’s writing task.
Hemingway once told me he sharpened twenty pencils; Willa
Gather that she read a passage from the Bible— not from piety,
she was quick to add, but to get jn touch with fine prose; she also

18 WRITEBS AT WORK

regretted diat she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of
1611 were not those she was in search of. My spring-board has
always been long walks.*’ Those long walks alone are a fairly
common device; Thomas Wolfe would sometimes roam through
the streets of Brooklyn all night. Reading the Bible before writing
is a much less common practice, and, in spite of Miss Gather’s dis-
claimer, I suspect that it did involve a touch of piety. Dependent
for success on forces partly beyond his control, an author may try
to propitiate the unknown powers. I knew one novelist, an
agnostic, who said he often got down on his knees and started the
working day with prayer.

The usual working day is three or four hours. Whether these
authors write with pencils, with a pen, or at a typewriter — and
some do all three in the course of completing a manuscript — an
important point seems to be that they ^1 work with their hands;
the only exception is Thurber in his sixties. I have often heard it
said by psychiatrists that writers belong to the “oral type.” The
truth seems to be that most of them are manual types. Words are
not merely sounds for them, but magical designs that their hands
make on paper. “I always think of writing as a physical thing,”
Nelson Algren says. “I am an artisan,” Simenon explains. “I need
to work with my hands. I would like to carve my novel in a piece
of wood.” Hemingway used to have the feeling that his fingers
did much of his thinking for him. After an automobile accident in
Montana, when the doctors said he might lose the use of his right
arm, he was afraid he would have to stop writing. Thurber used to
have the sense of thinking with his fingers on the keyboard of a
typewriter. When they were working together on their play The
Male Animal, Elliott Nugent used to say to him, “Well, Thurber,
we’ve got our problem, we’ve got all these people in the living-
room. What are we going to do with them?” Thurber would
answer that he didn’t know and couldn’t tell him until he’d sat
down at the typewriter and found out. After his vision became too
weak for the typewriter, he wrote very litde for a number of years
(using black crayon on yellow paper, about twenty scrawled
words to the page); then painfully he taught himself to compose
stories in his head and dictate them to a stenographer.

Dictation, for most authors, is a craft which, if acquired at all,
is learned rather late in life— and I think with a sense of jumping
over one step in the process of composition. Instead of giving die-

INTRODUCTION

tation, many writers seem to themselves to be taking it. “I listen
to the voices ” Faulker once said to me, “and when Ive put down
what the voices say, it's right. I don’t always like what they say,
but I don’t try to change it.” Mauriac says, “During a creative
period I write every day; a novel should not bo interrupted. When
I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were
taking down dictation, I stop.” Listening as they do to an inner
voice that speaks or falls silent as if by caprice, many writers from
the beginning have personified the voice as a benign or evil spirit.
For Hawthorne it was evil or at least frightening. “The Devil him-
self always seems to get into my inkstand,” he said in a letter to
his publisher, “and I can only exorcise him by pensful at a time.”
For Kipling the Daemon that lived in his pen was tyrannical but
well-meaning. “When your Daemon is in charge,” he said, “do not
try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.”

Objects on the writing-table, which is the altar of the Daemon,
are sometimes chosen with the same religious care as if they were
chalices and patens. Kipling said, “For my ink I demanded the
blackest, and had I been in my Father’s house, as once I was,
would have kept an ink-boy to grind me Indian-ink. All 'blue-
blacks’ were an abomination to my Daemon. . . . My writing-
blocks were built for me to an unchanged pattern of large, off-
white, blue sheets, of which I was most wasteful.” Often we hear
of taboos that must be ol - erved— even by Angus Wilson, although
he is as coolly rational as any fiction writer who ever set pen to
paper (the pen in his case is medium and the paper is, by prefer-
ence, a grammar-school exercise book). “Fiction writing is a kind
of magic,” Wilson says, “and I don’t care to talk about a novel
I’m doing because if I communicate the magic spell, even in an
abbreviated form, it loses its force for me.” One of the interviewed
authors — only one, but I suspect there are others like him — ^makes
a boast of his being superstitious. “I will not tolerate the presence
of yellow roses,” Capote says — ^“which is sad because they’re my
favourite flower. I can’t allow three cigarette butts in the same
ashtray. Won’t travel on a plane with tluee nuns. Won’t begin or
end anything on a Friday. It’s endless, the things I can’t and won’t.
But I derive some curious comfort from these primitive concepts.”
Perhaps they are not only comforting but of practical service in
helping him to weave his incantations. I can’t help thinking of the
drunk who always carried a vehtilated satcheL “What’s in it?”

WRITERS AT WORK

said his neighbour on a bus. "Just a mongoose. To kill snakes.”
The neighbour peered into the satchel and said, "There's nothing
in it. That’s an imaginazy mongoose.” The drunk said, "What
-about the snakes?”

At a summer conference on the novel, at Harvard, one of the
invited speakers gave a rather portentous address on the Respon-
sibilities of the Novelist. Frank O’Connor, on the platform, found
lihnself giggling at each new solemnity. After the address he
walked to the lectern and said, "All right, if there a'‘e any of my
students here I’d like them to remember that writing is fun.” On
that point most of these authors would agree. "I have always
found writing pleasant,” Forster says, "and don’t understand what
people mean by ‘throes of creation.’” “I write simply to amuse
myself,” says Moravia. Angus Wilson "started writing as a hobby.”
Thurber tells us that the act of writing “is either something ^e
writer dreads or something he actually likes, and I actually like it.
Even rewriting’s fun.” At another point he says, “When I’m not
writing, as my wife knows. I’m miserable.”

The professional writers who dread writing, as many do, are
usuaUy those whose critical sense is not only strong but unsleep-
ing, so that it won’t allow them to do even a first draft at top
speed. They are in most cases the “bleeders” who write one sen-
tence at a time, and can’t write it until the sentence before has
been revised. William Styron, one of the bleeders, is asked if he
enjoys wriling. "I certainly don’t,” he says. “I get a fine warm
feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much
negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it,
writing is hell.” But a moment later he says without any sense of
contradiction, “I find that I’m simply the happiest, the placidest,
when I’m writing . . . it’s the only time that I feel completely self-
possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well.” Not
writing is the genuine hell for Styron and others in his predica-

ment; writing is at worst a purgatory.

Whatever the original impulse that drives them to write — self-
expression, self-discovery, self-aggrandizement, or the pain of not
writing — ^most authors with a body of work behind them end by

developing new purposes. Simegj2B»..^^xample, would like to
create the pure novel, witha^foescrip^kA exposition, or argu-
ment: a book that will what a n^ikcan do. “In a pure

* I I ^ 1 so II

INTRODUCTION

novel,” he says, "you wouldn’t take sixty pages to describe the
South or Arizona or some country in Europe. Just the drama with
only what is absolutely part of t^ drama . . . almost a translation
of the laws of tr|igedy into the novel. I think the novel is die
tragedy of our day.” Critics have always advised him to write a
big novel, one with twenty or thirty characters. His answer is, "I
will never write a big novel. My big novel is the mosaic of all my
small novels.”

At this point he suggests still another purpose, or dream, thiit is
shared by almost all the writers who were interviewed. They want
to write the new book, climb the new mountain, which they hope
will be the highest of all, but still they regard it as only one con-
quest in a chain of mountains. The whole chain, the shelf of books,
the Collected Works, is their ultimate goal. Moravia says, "In the
works of every writer with any body of work to show for his effort,
you will find recurrent themes. I view the novel, a single novel as
well as a writer’s entire corpus, as a musical composition in which
the characters are themes.” Faulkner says, "With Soldiers Pay I
found out that writing was fun. But I found out afterwards t^t
not only each book had to have a design, but the whole output
or sum of a writer s work had to have a design.” Graham Greene
says, in The Lost Childhood, "A ruling passion gives to a shelf of
books the unity of a system.” Each of these novelists wants to pro-
duce not a random succ -'ssion of books, like discrete events for
critics to study one by one, without reference to earlier or later
events, but a complete system unified by his ruling passion, a
system of words on paper that is also a world of living persons
created in his likeness by the author. This dream must have had a
beginning quite early in the author’s life; perhaps it goes back to
what Thornton Wilder calls "the Nero in the bassinet,” the child
wanting to be omnipotent in a world he has made for himself; but
later it is elaborated with all the wisdom and fire and patient
workmanship that the grown man can bring to bear on it. Partide
after particle of the living self is transferred into the creation, until
at last it is an external world that corresponds to the inner world
and has the power of outlasting the author’s life.

I suspect that some such dream is shared by many authors, but
among those interviewed it is Faulkner who has come dosest to
achieving it, and he is also the author who reveals it most can-
didly. “Beginning with Sartoris". he says, "I discovered that my

22 WRITERS AT WORK

own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about
and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by
sublimating the actual into the apocryphal 1 would have complete
liberty to use whatever talent I might have tp its absolute top.
It opened up a mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my
own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space
but in time.'’ And then he says, looking back on his work as if on
the seventh day, “I like to think of the world I created as being a
kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if
it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse. My last
book will be the Doomsday Book, the Golden Book, of Yoknapa-
tawpha County. Then I shall break the pencil and I’ll have to
stop.”

That is a good place for me to stop too. I only have to add that
thanks for this book are due to three groups of persons. First they
are due to the interviewers, all amateurs in the field, who read the
authors’ works, asked them the right questions, and, at a sacrifice
of vanity, kept themselves in the background when writing their
reports. Then they are due to the editorial staff of The Paris
Review, and notably to George Plimpton and Marion Capron, for
their work in putting the series together. Finally, and most of all,
thanks are due to die authors who gave so much of their time,
revealed so much of their working methods, and incidentally told
so many good stories. It’s a shame that the book couldn’t be big
enough to contain all the interviews that have so far appeared; not
one is without interest; but the series is being continued in the
magazine, and 1 hope the other interviews, new and old, can be
included in a later volume.

Malcolm Cowley

E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster was bom on New Year’s Day, 1879. He was edu-
cated at Tonbridge and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he
enjoyed the stimulating company of what would later be called
the Bloomsbury Group. By 1903, as a political liberal, he was an
ardent contributor to the newly formed Independent Review. He
travelled extensively and in 1910 made his first visit to India,
which was to be the setting of his greatest novel.

In 1905, at the age of twenty-six, Forster published his first
novel. Where Angels Fc- ' to Tread, which he followed with a
succession of others: The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a
View (1908), and Howards End (1911). He spent the First World
War in Egypt as a civilian war worker, later compiling some of
his observations in a guidebook to Alexandria.

He finished his fifth and most famous work, A Passage to
India. It was his last novel. But his reputation was establimed,
and on the basis of his published work his stature as a novelist
continued to grow. “His reputation,” it was said, "goes up with
every book he doesn’t write.” Actually, Forster continued to pro-
duce brilliant work, all of it non-fiction: Abinger Harvest
Aspects of the Novel , Two Cheers for Democracy
and The HUl of Devi he produced a libretto tor
Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd.

Bombed out of his country home at Abinger during World
War II, Forster has lived for the past years in Cambridge, where
he is an honorary fellow of King’s College.

E. M. Forster

"That is not aU ‘Arctic Summer’ — there is almost half as much of
it again — but that’s all I want to read, because now it goes off, or
at least I think so, and I do not want my voice to go out into the
air while my heart is sinking. It will be more interesting to con-
sider what the problems before me were, and why I was unlikely
to solve them. I should like to do this, though it may involve us a
little in fiction-technicalities . . .”

So said E. M. Forster, addressing an audience at the Aldeburgh
Festival of 1551. He had been reading part of an unfinished novel
called "Arctic Summer.’’ At the end of the reading, he went on to
explain why he had not finished the novel, which led him to men-
tion what he called "fiction-technicalities.’’

Following up on Mr. Forster’s Aldeburgh remarks, we have
tried to record his views n such matters as he gave them in an
interview at King’s College, Cambridge, on the evening of June
2XHh, 1552.

A spacious and high-ceUinged room, furnished in the Edwardian
taste. One’s attention is caught by a massive carved wooden
mantelpiece of elaborate structure holding blue china m its niches.
Large gUt-framed portrait-drawings on the walls (his Thornton
ancestors and others), a "Turner” by his great-uncle, and some
modem pictures. Books of aU sorts, handsome and otherwise, in
English and French; armchairs decked in little shawls; a piano, a
solitaire-board, and the box of a Tae-trope; profusion of opened
letters; slippers neatly arranged in waste-paper basket.

In reading what follows the reader must imagine Mr. Forste/s
manner, which though of extreme amenity is a firm one: precise,
yet none the less elusive, administering a series of tiny surprises.

• 25-

WRITERS AT WORK

He makes a perpetual slight displacement of the repeated empha-
sis. His habit was to answer our questions by brief statements,
followed by decorative asides, often of great interest, but very
difficult to reproduce.

Interviewers: To begin with, may we ask you again, why did
you never finish "Arctic Summer”?

Forster: I have really answered this question in the foreword I
wrote for the reading. The crucial passage was this:

", . . whether these problems are solved or not, there remains a
still graver one. What is going to happen? I had got my antithesis
all right, the antithesis between the civilized man, who hopes for
an Arctic Summer in which there is time to get things done, and
the heroic man. But I had not settled what is going to happen, and
that is why the novel remains a fragment. The novelist should, I
think, always settle when he starts what is going to happen, what
his major event is to be. He may alter this event as he approaches
it, indeed he probably will, indeed he probably had beUer, or the
novel becomes tied up and tight. But the sense of a solid mass
ahead, a mountain round or over or through which {he interposed,
"in this case it would be through") the story must somehow go, is
most valuable and, for the novels I’ve tried to write, essential.”

Interviewers: How much is involved in this "solid mass”?
Does it mean that all the important steps in the plot must also be
present in the original conception?

Forster: Certainly not all the steps. But there must be some-
thing, some major object towards which one is to approach. When
I began A Passage to India I knew that something important
happened in the Malabar Caves, and that it would have a central
place in the novel — but I didn’t know what it would be.

Interviewers: But if you didn’t know what was going to hap-
pen to the characters in either instance, why was the case of A
Passage to India so different from that of "Arctic Summer”? . . .
In both cases you had your antithesis.

Forster: TTie atmosphere of “Arctic Summer” did not approach
the density of what I had in A Passage to India. Let me see how
to explain. The Malabar Caves represented an area in which con-
centration can take place. A cavity. {We noticed that he always
spoke of the caves quite literally — as for instance when he
interrupted himself earlier to say that the characters had to pass
"through” them.) They were something to focus everything up:

E. M. FORSTBE 27

they were tp engender an event like an egg. What I had in “Arctic
Sununer” was thinner, a background and colour only.

iNTERViEvrERS: You spoke of antitheses in your novels. Do you
regard these as essential to any novel you might write?

Forster: Let me think. . . . There was one in Howards End.
Perhaps a rather subtler one in The Longest Journey.

Interviewers: Would you agree that all your novels not only
deal with some dilemma but are intended to be both true and
useful in regard to it — ^so that if you felt a certain dilemma was
too extreme, its incompatibles too impossible to reconcile, you
wouldn’t write about it?

Forster: True and lovable would be my antithesis. I don’t think
useful comes into it. I’m not sure that 1 would be put oS simply
because a dilemma that I wanted to treat was insoluble; at least,
I don’t think I should be.

Interviewers: While we are on the subject of the planning of
novels, has a novel ever taken an unexpected direction?

Forster: Of course, that wonderful thing, a character running
away with you — ^which happens to everyone — that’s happened to
me. I’m afraid.

Interviewers: Can you describe any technical problem that
especially bothered you in one of the published novels?

Forster: I had trouble with the junction of Rickie and Stephen.
[The hero of The Longest Journey and his half-brother.] How to
make them intimate, I mr "ti. I fumbled about a good deal. It is
all right once they are together. ... I didn’t know how to get
Helen to Howards End. That part is all contrived. There are too
many letters. And again, it is all right once she is there. But ends
always give me trouble.

Interviewers: Why is that?

Forster: It is parUy what I was talking about a moment ago.
Characters run away with you, and so won’t fit on to what is
coming.

iNTERviEvirERS: Another question of detail. What was the e^act
function of the long description of the Hindu festival in A Passaefi
to India?

Forster: It was architecturally necessary. I needed a lump, or a
Hindu temple if you Iik& — a mountain standing up. It is well
placed; and it gathers up some strings. But there ought to be more
after it. The lump sticks out a little too much.

WRITEBS AT WORK

Interviewers: To leave technical questions for a moment, have
you ever described any type of situation of which you have had
no personal knowledge?

Forster: The home-life of Leonard and Jacky in Howards End
is one case, I knew nothing about that, I believe I brought it off.

Interviewers: How far removed in time do you have to be
from an experience to describe it?

Forster: Place is more important than time in this matter. Let
me tell you a little more about A Passage to India. I had a great
deal of difficulty with the novel, and thought I would never finish
it, I began it in 1812, and then came the war, I took it with me
when I returned to India in 1821, but found what I had written
wasn’t India at all. It was like sticking a photograph on a picture.
However, I couldn’t write it when I was in India. When I got
away, I could get on with it.

Interviewers: Some critics have objected to your way of hand-
ling incidents of violence. Do you agree with their objections?

Forster: I think I solved the problem satisfactorily in Where
Angels Fear to Tread. In other cases, I don’t know. The scene in
the Malabar Caves is a good substitute for violence. Which were
the incidents you didn’t like?

Interviewers: I have always been worried by the suddenness
of Gerald’s death in The Longest Journey.^ Why did you treat it
in that way?

Forster: It had to be passed by. But perhaps it was passed by
in the wrong way.

Interviewers: I have also never felt comfortable about Leonard
Bast’s seduction of Helen in Howards End. It is such a sudden
affair. It seems as though we are not told enough about it for it
to be convincing. One might say that it came off allegorically but
not realistically.

Forster: I think you might be right. I did it like that out of a
wish to have surprises. It has to be a surprise for Margaret, and
this was best done by making it a surprise for the reader too. Too
much may have been sacrificed to this.

Interview'Ers: A more general question. Would you admit to
there being any symbolism in your novels? Lionel Trilling rather

*The famous fifth chapter in The Longest Journey begins "Gerald died
that afternoon."

E. M. FORSTEE

seems to imply that there is, in his books on you — ^symbolism, that
is, as distinct from allegory or parable. “Mrs. Moore,” he says,
"will act with a bad temper to Adela, but her actions will some-
how have a good echo; and her children will be her further
echo ”

Forster: No, I didn’t think of that. But mightn’t there be some
of it elsewhere? Can you try me with some more examples?

Interviewers: The tree at Howards End? [A wych-elm, fre-
quently referred to in the novel.]

Forster: Yes, that was symbolical; it was the genius of the
house.

Interviewers: What was the significance of Mrs. Wilcox’s in-
fluence on the other characters after her death?

Forster: I was interested in the imaginative effect of someone
alive, but in a different way from other characters — ^living in other
lives.

Interviewers: Were you influenced by Samuel Butler in this?
I mean, by his theories of vicarious immortality?

Forster: No. (Pause.) 1 think I have a more poetical mind than
Butler’s.

Interviewers: Now can we ask you a few questions about the
immediate business of writing? Do you keep a notebook?

Forster: No, I should feel it improper.

Interviewers: But you would refer to diaries and letters?

Forster: Yes, that’s different.

Interviewers: When you go, say, to the circus, would you ever
feel, "how nice it would be to put that in a novel”?

Forster: No, I should feel it improper. I never say “that might
be useful.” I don’t think it is right for an author to do so. (He spoke
firmly.) However I have been Inspired on the. spot. “The Story of
a Panic” is the simplest example; "The Road from Colonus” is
another. Sense of a place also inspired me to write a short story
called "The Rock,” but the inspiration was poor in quality, and
the editors wouldn’t take the story. But I have talked about this
in the introduction to my short stories.

Interviewers: Do you pre-figure a shape to your novels?

Forster: No, I am too unvisual to do so. (W c found this sur-
prising in view of his explanation of the Hindu festival scene,
above.)

Interviewers: Does this come .out in any other way?

WRITERS AT WORl

Forster: I find it difficult to recognize people when I meet
them, though I remember about them. I remember their voices.

Interviewers: Do you have any Wagnerian leitmotiv system
to help you keep so many themes going at the s^me time?

Forster: Yes, in a way, and I’m certainly interested in music
and musical methods. Though I shouldn’t call it a system.

Interviewers: Do you write every day, or only under inspira-
tion?

Forster: The latter. But the act of writing inspires me. It is a
nice feeling . . . (indulgently). Of course, I had a very literary
childhood. I was the author of a number of works between the
ages of six and ten. There were “Ear-rings through the Keyhole”
and "Scuffles in a Wardrobe.”

INTERVIE^VERS: Which of your novels came first to your mind?

Forster: Half of A Room with a View. I got that far, and then
there must have been a hitch.

Interviewers: Did you ever attempt a novel of an entirely dif-
ferent sort from the ones you have published?

Forster: For some time 1 had the idea of an historical novel.
The setting was to have been a Renaissance one. Reading Thais
(by Anatole France) finally decided me to try it. But nothing came
of it in the end.

Interviewers: How do you name your characters?

Forster: I usually find the name at the start, but not always.
Rickie’s brother had several names. (He .showed us some early
manuscript portions of The Longest Journey in which Stephen
Wonham appeared as Siegfried; also an omitted chapter, which
he described as “extremely romantic.") Wonham is a country name
and so is Quested. (We looked at an early draft of A Passage to
India in which to his surprise the heroine was found going under
the name of Edith. This was later changed to Janet, before be-
coming Adela.) Herriton I made up. Munt was the name of my
first governess in the house in Hertfordshire. There really was a
family caUed Howard who once owned the real Howard.s End.
Where Angels Fear to Tread should have been called “Mon-
teriano,” but the publisher thought this wouldn’t sell. It was Dent
(Professor E. J. Dent] who gave me the present title.

Interviewers: How much do you admit to modelling your
characters on real people?

Forster: We all like to pretend we don’t use real people, but

E. M. FOESTEB

one does actually. I used some of my family. Miss Bartlett was my
Aunt Emily — ^they all read the book but they none of them saw it
Uncle Willie turned into Mrs. Failing. He was a bluff and simple
character (correcting himself) — ^bluff without being simple. Miss
Lavish was actually a Miss Spender. Mrs. Honeychurch was my
grandmother. The three Miss Dickinsons condensed into two Miss
Schlegels. Philip Herriton 1 modelled on Professor Dent He knew
this, and took an interest in his own progress. I have used several
tourists.

Interviewers: Do all your characters have real life models?

Forster: In no book have I got down more than the people I
like, the person I think I am, and the people who irritate me. This
puts me among the large body of authors who are not really
novelists, and have to get on as best they can with these three
categories. We have not the power of observing the variety of life
and describing it dispassionately. There are a few who have done
this. Tolstoi was one, wasn’t he?

Interviewers: Can you say anything about the process of turn-
ing a real person into a fictional one?

Forster: A useful trick is to look back upon such a person with
half -closed eyes, fully describing certain characteristics. I am left
with about two-thirds of a human being and can get to work. A
likeness isn’t aimed at and couldn’t be obtained, because a man’s
only himself amidst the '^articular circumstances of his life and
not amid other circumstances. So that to refer back to Dent when
Philip was in difficulties with Cino, or to ask one and one-half
Miss Dickinsons how Helen should comport herself with an ille-
gitimate baby would liave ruined the atmosphere and the book.
When all goes well, the original material soon disappears, and a
character who belongs to the book and nowhere else emerges.

Interviewers: Do any of your characters represent yourself at
aU?

Forster: Rickie more than any. Also Philip. And Cecil [in A
Room with a View] has got something of Philip in him.

Interviewers: What degree of reality do your characters have
for you after you have finished writing about them?

Forster: Very variable. There are some I like thinking about.
Rickie and Stephen, and Margaret Schlegel-— they are characters
whose fortunes I have been interested to follow. It doesn’t matter
if they died in the novel or not.

WRITERS AT WORK

Interviewers: We have got a few more questions about your
woiic as a whole. First, to what degree is each novel an entirely
fresh experiment?

Forster: To quite a large extent. But I wonder if experiment
is the word?

Interviewers: Is there a hidden pattern behind the whole of
an author’s work, what Henry James called “a figure in the car-
pet”? (He looked dubious.) Well, do you like having secrets from
the reader?

Forster (brightening: Ah now, that’s a different question. . . .
I was pleased when Peter Burra* noticed that the wasp upon
which Codbole meditates during the festival in A Passage to India
had already appeared earlier in the novel.

Interviewers: Had the wasps any esoteric meaning?

Forster: Only in the sense that there is something esoteric in
India about all animals. I was just putting it in; and afterwards I
saw it was something that might return non-logically in the story
later.

Interviewers: How far aware are you of your own technical
cleverness in general?

Forster: We keep coming back to that. People will not realize
how little conscious one is of these things; how one flounders
about. They want us to be so much better informed than we are.
If critics could only have a coiu’se on writers’ not thinking things
out — a course of lectures . . . (He smiled).

Interviewers: You have said elsewhere that the authors you
have learned most from were Jane Austen and Proust. What did
you learn from Jane Austen technically?

Forster: I learned the possibilities of domestic humour. I was
more ambitious than she was, of course; I tried to hitch it on to
other things.

Interviewers: And from Proust?

Forster: I learned ways of looking at character from him. The
modem sub-conscious way. He gave me as much of the modem
way as I could take. I couldn’t read Freud or Jung myself; it had
to be filtered to me.

Interviewers: Did any other novelists influence you techni-
cally? What about Meredith?

’ Burra was the author of the preface to the “Everyman” Edition of A
Passage to India.

E. M. FORSTER

Forster; I admired him — The Egoist and the better constructed
bits of the other novels; but then that's not the same as his in-
fluencing me. I don’t know if he did that. He did things 1 couldn’t
do. What I admirsd was the sense of one thing opening into
another. You go into a room with him, and then that opens into
another room, and that into a further one.

Interviewers: What led you to make the remark quoted by
Lionel Trilling, that the older you got the less it seemed to you to
matter that an artist should “develop.”

Forster; I am more interested in achievement than in advance
on it and decline from it. And I am more interested in works than
in authors. The paternal wish of critics to show how a writer
dropped off or picked up as he went along seems to me misplaced.
I am only interested in myself as a producer. What was it Mahler
said? — "anyone will sufficiently understand me who will trace my
development through my nine symphonies.” This seems odd to
me; I couldn’t imagine myself making such a remark; it seems too
uncasual. Other authors find themselves much more an object of
study. I am conceited, but not interested in myself in this particu-
lar way. Of course I like reading my own work, and often do it.
I go gently over the bits that I think are bad.

Interviewers: But you think highly of your own work?

Forster: That was implicit, yes. My regret is that I haven’t
written a bit more — that t) body, the corpus, isn’t bigger. I think
I am different from other writers; they profess much more worry
(I don’t know if it is genuine). I have always found writing
pleasant, and don’t understand what people mean by “throes of
creation.” I’ve enjoyed it, but believe that in some ways it is good.
Whether it will last, I have no idea.

P. N.Furbank
F. J. H. Haskell

Francois Mauriac

Franfois Mauriac has defined himself as a writer in these words:
"I am a metaphysician working on the concrete, I try to make the
Catholic universe of evil perceptible, tangible, odorous. The theo-
logians give us an abstract idea of the sinner. I give him flesh and
blood.”

The author was bom of a middle-class family in Bordeaux in 1885
and began his education at a school run by Jesuits. Afterwards he
attended a lycSe, the University of Bordeaux, and, very briefly,
the University of Paris. In 1909 he published a book of poems, the
first of a large body of work preoccupied with themes of conflict
between human emotions . .id religious principle and obligation.

In a dozen years, starting in , he wrote the ten novels which
established his reputation as France’s leading Catholic novelist.
Notable among them were: Le Baiser au ISpreux (A Kiss for the
Leper) , Ginitrix (Genetrix) ■, Th^rdse Desqueyroux

(Therese) , and Le Noeud de vipdres (Knot of Vipers)

he was elected to the French Academy. Shortly afterwards,
he commenced publication of his Journals, volumes of personal
reflection and frequently controversial comment on the contem-
porary French scene. Mauriac has also written lives of Racine
and Jesus he is the author of four plays, and of
many books of stories, literary criticism, and essays, he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

For the last three years he has contributed to the weekly
TExpress which continues the outspoken style of the Journals.
Mauriac now divides his time between Paris and his estate called
Malagar in the Guyenne country near Bordeaux, die setting of
many of his novels.

Francois Mauriac

“Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the fact
of the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another
planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it
has its own flora and fauna. Thus, Faulkners technique is cer-
tainly the best one with which to paint Faulkner’s world, and
Kafka’s nightmare has produced its own myths that make it com-
municable. Benjamin Constant, Stendhal, Eugene Fromentin,
Jacques RiviSre, Radiguet, all used different techniques, took dif-
ferent liberties, and set themselves different tasks. The work of art
itself, whether its title is Adolphe, Lucien Leuwen, Dominique,
Le Diable au corps or A la Recherche du temps perdu, is the
solution to the problem of technique.”

With these words Fra, ;ois Mauriac, discussing the novel in
the French literary magazine La Table ronde of August 1749,
described his own position. In March 1753, he was interviewed
on the same subject for The Paris Review by Jean le Marchand,
Secretaire CenSrale of La Table ronde. M. le Marchand began by
asking him about his earlier statement.

Maumac: My opinion hasn’t changed. I believe that my
younger fellow novelists are greatly preoccupied with technique.
They seem to think a good novel ought to follow certain rules
imposed from outside. In fact, however, this preoccupation ham-
pers them and embarrasses them in their creation. The great
novelist doesn’t depend on anyone but himself. Proust resembled
none of his predecessors and he did not have, he could not have,
any successors. The gicat novelist breaks his mould; he alone can
use it. Balzac created the "Balzacian” novel; its style was suitable
only for Balzac.

'There is a close tie between a 'novelist’s originality in general

WRITERS AT WORK

and the personal quality of his style. A borrowed style is a bad
style. American novelists from Faulkner to Hemingway invented
a style to express what they wanted to say — ^and it is a style that
can’t be passed on to their followers.

Interviewer: You have said that every novelist should invent
his style for himself — how would you describe your own?

Mauriac: In all the time I have been writing novels I have very
seldom asked myself about the technique I was using. When I
begin to write I don’t stop and wonder if I am interfering too
directly in the story, or if I know too much about my characters,
or whether or not I ought to judge them. I write with complete
naiveti, spontaneously. I’ve never had any preconceived notion of
what I could or could not do.

If today I sometimes ask myself these questions it’s because
they are asked of me — ^because they are asked all around me.

Really there is no problem of this type whose solution is not
found in the completed work, whether good or bad. The preoccu-
pation with these questions is a stumbling block for the French
novel. The crisis in French novel writing that people talk about so
much will be solved as soon as our young writers succeed in get-
ting rid of the naive idea that Joyce, Kafka, and Faulkner hold
the Tables of the Law of fictional technique. I’m convinced that
a man with the real novelist’s temperament would transcend these
taboos, these imaginary rules.

Interviewer: All the same, haven’t you ever deliberately made
use of definite techniques in novel writing?

Mauriac: A novelist spontaneously works out the techniques
that fit his own nature. Thus in ThSrdse Desqueyroux I used some
devices that came from the silent films: lack of preparation, the
sudden opening, flashbacks. They were methods that were new
and surprising at that time. I simply resorted to the techniques
that my instinct suggested to me. My novel Destins [Lines of
Life] was likewise composed with an eye to film techniques.

Interviewer: When you begin to write, are all the important
points of the plot already established?

Mauruc: That depends on the novel. In general they aren’t.
There is a point of departure, and there are some characters. It
often happens that the first characters don’t go any further and,
on the other hand, vaguer, more inconsistent characters show new
possibilities as the story goes on and assume a place we hadn't

FRANgOIS MAURIAC 39

foreseen. To take an example from one of my plays, Asmodie, I
had no idea at the outset how M. Coutilre was going to develop,
and how important he was going to become in the play.

Interviewer: Ii» writing your novels, has any one problem
given you particular trouble?

Mauriac: Not yet. Today, however, I cannot remain unaware
of the comments made on my work from the standpoint of tech-
nique. That’s why the novel I just finished won’t be published this
year. I want to look over it again in that light.

Interviewer: Have you ever described a situation of which
you had no personal experience?

Mauriac: That goes without saying — ^for example. I’ve never
poisoned anyonel Certainly a novelist more or less comprehends
all his characters; but I have also described situations of which I
had no direct experience.

Interviewer: How distant in time do you have to be before
you can describe your own experiences, or &ings you have seen?

Mauruc: One cannot be a true novelist before one has attained
a certain age, and that is why a young author has almost no chance
of writing successfully about any other period of his life than his
childhood or adolescence. A certain distance in time is absolutely
necessary for a novelist, unless he is writing a journal.

All my novels take place in the period contemporary with my
adolescence and my youth. * hey are all a “remembrance of things
past.” But if Proust’s case helped me to understand my own, it was
without any conscious imitation on my part.

Interviewer: Do you make notes for future use? When you see
something of interest in the course of life do you think, “That will
be something I can use”?

Mauriac: Never; for the reason I have just given. I don’t observe
and I don’t describe; I rediscover. I rediscover the narrow Jan-
senist world of my devout, unhappy, and introverted childhood.
It is as though when I was twenty a door within me had closed
for ever on that which was going to become the material of my
work.

Interviewer: To what extent is your writing dominated by
sense-perceptions — ^hearing, sound, and sight?

Mauriac: Very largely — ^the critics have all commented on the
importance of the sense of smell in my novels. Before beginning
a novel I recreate inside myself its places, its mUieu, its colours

WRITERS AT WORK

and smells. I revive within myself the atmosphere of my childhood
and my youth — am my characters and their world.

Interviewer: Do you write every day, or only when you feel
inspired?

Mauruc: I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period
I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease
to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking
down dictation, I stop.

Interviewer: Have you ever tried to write a novel entirely
different from those you have written?

Mauriac: Sometimes I’ve thought of writing a detective story,
but I’ve never done it.

Interviewer: How do you hit on the names of your characters?

Mauruc: I have been unwise enough to use names that are very
well known in my part of the country, around Bordeaux. So far,
I have been able to avoid the great embarrassments that this
system could have caused me.

Interviewer; To what extent are your characters based on real
people?

Mauruc: There is almost always a real person in the beginning,
but then he changes so that sometimes he no longer bears the
slightest resemblance to the original. In general it is only the
secondary characters who are taken directly from life.

Interviewer: Have you a special system for changing a real
person into an imaginary one?

Mauruc: There is no system ... it is simply the art of the novel.
What takes place is a sort of crystallization around the person. It
is quite indescribable. For a true novelist this transformation is a
part of one’s inner life. If I used some trick of prefabrication the
result would not be a living character.

Interviewer; Do you describe yourself in any of your charac-
ters?

Mauruc: To some degree in all of them. I particularly de-
scribed myself in VEnfant charge de chaines and in La Robe
pritexte. Ives Frontenac in Le Mysidh Frontenac is both me and
not me: there are strong resemblances, very strong, but at the
same time a considerable deformation.

Interviewer: From the standpoint of technique, what writers
influenced you most?

Mauruc; I can’t tell. As far as technique goes I have been in-

FRANCOIS MAURIAC 41

fluenced by nobody, or again by all the authors I have read. One
is always the product of a culture. We are sometimes influenced
by humble writers whom we have forgotten — ^perhaps I was in-
fluenced only by those books I was steeped in for so long, the
books I read in childhood. I don’t think I have been influenced
by any other novelist. I am a novelist of atmosphere, and poets
have been very important for me: Racine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Maurice de Gu4rin, and Francois Jammes, for example.

Intervieweh: Do you think a novelist should “renew himself”?

Mauriac: I feel that a writer’s first duty is to be himself, to
accept his limitations. The effort of self-expression should affect
the manner of expression.

1 have never begun a novel without hoping that it would be
the one that would make it unnecessary for me to write another.
I have had to start again from scratch with each one. What had
gone before didn’t count. ... I was not adding to a fresco. Like a
man who has decided to start his life over again, 1 have told
myself that I had so far accomplished nothing: for I have always
believed that my chef doeucre would be the novel I was working
on at the time.

Interviewer: Once a novel is finished do you remain attached
to your characters? Do you maintain contact with them?

Maitriac: My characters exist for me only when someone talks
to me about them, or writes an article about them. I wrote a
sequel to ThSrdse Dest 'eyroux because I was induced to do so
from outside. Once a book is written and has left me it exists only
through others. Night before last I listened on the radio to an
adaptation of DSsert de t Amour. Distorted as it was, I recognized
Dr. Courr^ges, his son Raymond, Marie Cross, the kept woman.
This little world was speaking, suffering before me, this world
that had left me thirty years before. I recognized it, slightly dis-
torted by the mirror that reflected it.

We put the most of ourselves into certain novels, which perhaps
are not the best. For example in Le Mystdre Frontenac I sought
to record my adolescence, to bring to life my mother and my
father’s brother, who was our tutor. Quite apart from any merits
or defects it might possess, this book has for me a heart-rending
tone. Actually I don’t leread it any more than the others: I only
reread my books when I have to in correcting proofs. The publica-
tion of my complete works condemned me to this: it is as painful

WRITERS AT WORE

as rereading old letters. It is thus that death emerges from abstrac-
tion, thus we touch it like a thing: a handful of ashes, of dust

Interviewer: Do you still read novels?

MAinuAC: I read very few. Eveiy day I find that age asphyxiates
the characters inside of me. I was once a passionate reader, I
might say insatiable, but now . . . When I was young, my own
future assured to the Madame Bovarys, the Anna Kareninas, the
characters from Balzac, the atmosphere that made them, for me,
living creatures. They spread out before me all that I dreamed of
for myself. My destiny was prefigured by theirs. Then, as 1 lived
longer, they closed around me l^e rivals. A kind of competition
obliged me to measure myself against them, above all against the
characters of Balzac. Now, however, they have become part of
that which has been completed.

On the other hand, I can still reread a novel by Bemanos, or
even Huysmans, because it has a metaphysical extension. As for
my younger contemporaries, it is their technique, more than any-
thing else, that interests me.

It is because novels no longer have any hold on me that I am
given over more to history, to history in the making.

Interviewer: Do you believe this attitude is peculiar to your-
self? Don’t you find, rather, that at a time when the impact of
events such as those in Algeria is very heavy, the world has de-
tached itself somewhat from fiction? Perhaps the distance is no
longer there that is necessary for the reception of the novel.

Mauriac: Every period in history has been more or less tragic.
The events we are living through would not suffice to explain what
is loosely called the crisis of the novel, which is not, I might add, a
crisis of readership, inasmuch as the public does read novels today,
and printings are much larger today than they were in my youth.

No, the crisis of the novel, in my opinion, is of a metaphysical
nature, and is connected with a certain conception of man. The
argument against the psychological novel derives essentially from
the conception of man held by the present generation: a concep-
tion that is totally negative. This altered view of the individual
began a long time ago. The works of Proust show it Between
Stoanns Way (the perfect novel) and The Past Recaptured we
watch the characters dissolve. As the novel advances, the charac-
ters decay.

Today, along with nonrepresentational art we have the non-

FRANCOIS MAURIAC 43

representational novel — ^the characters simply have no distinguish-
ing features.

I believe that the crisis of the novel, if it exists, is right there,
essentially, in th<} domain of technique. The novel has lost its
purpose. That is the most serious difficulty, and it is from there
that we must begin. The younger generation believes, after Joyce
and Proust, that it has discovered die “purpose” of the old novel to
have been prefabricated and unrelated to reality.

Interviewer: Doesn’t talking about the characters’ dissolving
put too much emphasis on the experimental novel? After all, there
are still characters in the novels of Proust and Kafka. 'They have
changed, of course, as compared to those of Balzac, but you
remember them, you know them by name, they exist for the
reader.

Mauruc: I am going to shock you. I scarcely know the names
of Kafka’s characters, and yet at the same time I know him well,
because he himself fascinates me. I have read his diary, his letters,
everything about him. But as for his novels, I cannot read them.

In Proust, I have mentioned that one is struck by the slow decay
of each character. After The Captive the novel turns into a long
meditation on jealousy; Albertine no longer exists in the flesh;
characters who seem to exist, at the beginning of the novel, such
as Charlus, become confused with the vice which devours them.

The crisis of the novel, then, is metaphysical. The generation
that preceded ours was no longer Christian, but it believed in the
individual, which comes to the same thing as believing in die
soul. What each of us understands by the word “soul” is different;
but in any case it is the fixed point around which the individual is
constructed.

Faith in Cod was lost for many, but not the values this faith
postulates. The good was not bad, and the bad was not good. The
collapse of the novel is due to the destruction of this fundamental
concept: the awareness of good and evil. The language itself has
been devalued and emptied of its meaning by this attack on
conscience.

Observe that for the novelist who has remained Christian, like
myself, man is someone creating himself or destroying himself. He
is not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mould once and for all.
This is what 'makes the traditional psychological novel so different
from what 1 did or thought I was doing. The human being as 1

WRITERS AT WORK

conceive him in the novel is a being caught up in the drama of
salvation, even if he doesn’t know it.

And yet, I admire in the young novelists their "search for the
absolute,” their hatred of false appearances and illusions. They
made me think of what Alain and Simone Weil said of a "purify-
ing atheism.” . . . But let’s not go into that — I’m no philosopher.

Interviewer: That’s what everyone says you are. Besides, why
deny it?

Mauruc: Each time literary talent decreases, the philosophers
gain. I am not saying that’s against them, but little by little they
have taken over. The present generation is terribly intelligent. In
the old days one could have talent and still be a little stupid;
today, no Insofar as the young are philosophers, they prob-

ably have much less need of fiction than we did.

It is very important, all the same, that the master who has most
influenced our period in literature should be a philosopher. Jean-
Paul Sartre has, moreover, great talent, without which he would
not have taken the position he has now occupied. Compare his
influence to that of Bergson, who stayed in the domain of ideas
and only affected literature indirectly, through his influence on
the literary men themselves.

Interviewer: Do you believe that literature has been turned
over to the philosophers by accident?

Mauriac: There is a historical reason for it: the tragedy of
France. Sartre expressed the despair of this generation. He did
not create it, but he gave it a justification and a style.

Interviewer: You said that you were more interested in the
man Kafka than in his work. In the Figaro littiraire, you wrote
that throughout Wuthering Heights it is the figure of Emily
Bronte which attracted you. In a word, when the characters dis-
appear, the author steps into the foreground and little by little
takes over the scene.

Mauriac: Almost all the works die while the men remain. We
seldom read any more of Rousseau than his Confessions, or of
Chateaubriand than his Mimoires doutre-tombe. They alone
interest us. I have always been and still remain a great admirer
of Gide. It already appears, however, that only his journal and
Si le grain ne meurt, the story of his childhood, have any chance
of lasting. 'The rarest thing in literature, and the only success, is
when the author disappears and his work remains. We don’t know

FRANigOlS MAUBIAC 45

who Shakespeare was, or Homer. People have worn themselves
out writing about the life of Racine without being able to establish
anything. He is lost in the radiance of his creation. That is quite
rare.

There are almost no writers who disappear into their work. The
opposite almost always comes about. Even the great characters
that have survived in novels are found now more in handbooks
and histories, as though in a museum. As living creatures they get
worn out, and they grow feeble. Sometimes we even see them die.
Madame Bovary seems to me to be in poorer health than she
used to be. . . .

Intebvieweb: You think so?

Maubuc: Yes, and even Anna Karenina, even the Karamazovs.
First, because they need readers in order to live and the new
generations are less and less capable of providing them with the
air they need to breathe.

Intebvieweb: In one place you speak of the greatness of the
novel as the perfect literary form, the king of arts.

Maubuc: I was praising my merchandise ... no art is more
royal than another. It is the artist who counts. Tolstoi and Dickens
and Balzac are great, not the literary form they demonstrated.

Interviewer: Has Christianity lived so intensely as yours
created problems for you as a novelist?

Maubuc: All the time. It seems comical today, but I was re-
garded in Catholic cir* ’^s almost as a pornographic writer. That
held me down somewhat.

If I were asked, "Do you believe your faith has hampered or
enriched your literary life?” I would answer yes to both parts of
the question. My Christian faith has enriched me. It has also ham-
pered me, in that my books are not what they might have been
had I let myself go. Today I know that God pays no attention to
what we write; He uses it.

I am a Christian, though, and I would like to end my life not
in violence and anger, but in peace. For the greatest temptation
at the dose of a Christian’s life is retreat, silence. Even to the
music I love most I now prefer silence, because there is no silence
with God.

My enemies believe I want to remain on stage at any price —
that I make use of politics in order to survive. They would be
astounded indeed if they knew that my greatest happiness is to

sr s

WRITERS AT WORK

alone on my terrace, trying to guess the direction of the wind
from the odours it carries. What I fear is not being forgotten after
my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were
saying, it is not our books that survive, but oar poor lives that
linger in the histories.

TRANSLATED RT JOHN TrAIN

AND Lydia Moffat

Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary’s success as a novelist came after years of seeming
faflure. He was bom in 1888 in County Donegal, Ireland, m
Anglo-Irish parentage. He studied painting at Edinburgh and
Paris and then took degree at Oxford, before setting off to the
Balkan War in 1712 to serve with the British Red Cross. In the
First World War he fought in the Cameroons, where he was
wounded. After the war lie served in a long series of remote
colonial posts in the West African bush country. He returned
to England in 1720 to write novels. He was forty-four when the
first was published {Aissa Saved, 1732). His first critical success
came with Mister Johnson (1739), and financial success with the
best-selling The Horse's Mouth (1744), published in Cary’s fifty-
sixth year.

Cary is best-known for the novels of his two trilogies: Herself
Surprised , To Be a Pilgrim ', The Horse's Mouth
and A Prisoner of Grace , Except the Lord
and Not Honour More , The large scope of the trilogy per-
fectly suited Cary’s talent. V. S. Pritchett described him as "the
chameleon among contemporary novelists. Put him down in any
environment or any dass, rich, middling, or poor, English, Irish, or
foreign, and he changes colour and becomes whatever his subject
is from an English cook to an African delinquent.”

Never in good health, Cary kept on writing at his home in
Oxford even after he learned in 1755 that he was the victim of
incurable progressive paralysis. Besides articles and short stories,
he had completed a book of critical lectures, Art and Reality,
before he died in March 1757.

Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary, a sprightly man with an impish crown of grey hair
set at a jaunty angle on the back of his head, lives in a high and
rather gloomy house in North Oxford. Extremely animated, Mr.
Cary’s movements are decisive, uncompromising and retain some
of the brisk alertness of his military career. His speech is over-
whelming: voluminous and without hesitation or effort. His rather
high voice commands attention, but is expressive and emphatic
enough to be a little hard to follow. He is a compactly built,
angular man with a keen, determined face, sharp, humorous eyes,
and well-defined features. His quick and energetic expressions
and bearing create the feeling that it is easier for him to move
about than to sit still, and easier to talk than to be silent, even
though, like most good talkers, he is a creative and intelligent
listener.

His house, a Victorian } jilding with pointed Gothic windows
and dark prominent gables, stands opposite the University cricket
ground, and just by Keble College. It is a characteristically North
Oxford house, contriving to form part of a row without any ap-
pearance of being aware of its neighbours. It lies only a little back
from the road, behind a small overgrown garden, thick with
bushes. The house and garden have all the air of being obstinately
’property,’ self-contained and a little severe. So we weren’t really
surprised at having to wait on the porch and ring away at the
bell three or four times; or to learn, when Mr. Cary himself even-
tually opened the door, that his housekeeper was deaf. A very
large grand piano half fills the comfortable room into which we
were led. It has one lamp for the treble, another for the bass. The
standard of comfort is that of a successful member of the profes-
sional class; the atmosphere a little Edwardian, solid, comforkAle,

WRITERS AT WORK

unpretentious, with no obtrusive brtc-d-brac. Along one wall is a
group of representational paintings done by Cary himself in the
past. He has, he says, no time for painting now. He is the kind of
man who knows exactly what he has time for. we got down to
the questions right away.

Interviewers: Have you by any chance been shown a copy of
Barbara Haidy s essay on your novels in the latest number of
Essays in Criticism?

Cary: On "Form.” Yes I saw it. Quite good, I thought.
Interviewers: Well, setting the matter of form aside for the
moment, we were interested in her attempt to relate you to the
tradition of the family chronicle. Is it in fact your conscious in-
tention to re-create what she calls the pseudo-saga?

Cary: Did she say that? Must have skipped that bit.
Interviewers: Well, she didn’t say “consciously,” but we were
interested to know whether this was your intention.

Cary: You mean, did I intend to follow up Galsworthy and
Walpole? Oh, no, no, no. Family life, no. Family life just goes on.
Toughest thing in the world. But of course it is also the microcosm
of a world. You get everything there — birth, life, death, love and
jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and
the old. And I always choose the biggest stage possible for my
theme.

Interviewers: What about the eighteenth-century novelists?
Someone vaguely suggested that you recaptured their spirit, or
something of that kind.

Cary: Vaguely is the word. I don’t know who I’m like. I’ve been
called a metaphysical novelist, and if that means I have a fairly
dear and comprehensive idea of the world I’m writing about, I
suppose that’s true.

Interviewers: You mean an idea about the nature of the world
which guides the actions of the characters you are creating?

Cary: Not so much the ideas as their background. 1 don’t care
for philosophers in books. They are always bores. A novel should
be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than argu-
ments.

Interviewers: Background — ^you said background.

Cary: The whole set-up — character — of the world as we know
it. Roughly, for me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For
good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very

JOYCE CARY 51

queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and there-
fore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and
lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A
world in everlastiifg conflict between die new idea and the old
allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old estab-
lishment.

Interviewers: ML>s Hardy complains that the form shows too
clearly in your novels.

Cary: Others complain that I don’t make the fundamental idea
plain enough. This is every writers dilemma. Your form is your
meaning, and your meaning dictates the form. But what you try to
convey is reality — ^the fact plus the feeling a total complex ex-
perience of a real world. If you make your scheme too explicit, die
framework shows and the book dies. If you hide it too thoroughly,
the book has no meaning and therefore no form. It is a mess.

Interviewers: How does this problem apply in The Moon-
light?

Cary: I was dealing there with the contrast between conven-
tional systems in different centuries — systems created by man’s
imagination to secure their lives and give them what they seek
from life.

Interviewers: Didn’t the critics call Rose a tyrant?

Cary: Oh, they were completely wrong about Rose. She was a
Victorian accepting the religion and the conventions of her time
and sacrificing her own happiness to carry them out. A fine woman.
And no more of a tyrant than any parent who tries to guide a
child in the right paA. That religion, that system, has gone, but it
was thoroughly good and eifident in its own time. I mean, it gave
people good lives and probably all the happiness that can be
achieved for anybody in this world.

Interviewers: Are the political aspects of your work controlled
by the same ideas?

Caby: Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul —
politics does the same thing for the body. Of course they overlap
— ^this is a very rough description. But the politician is responsible
for law, for physical security, and in a world of tumult, of per-
petual conflict, he has the alternatives, roughly again, of persuad-
ing people or shooting them. In the democracies, we persuade.
And this gives great power to the spellbinder, the artist in words,
the preacher, the demagogue, whatever you call him. Rousseau,

WRITERS AT WORK

Marx, Tolstoi, these were great spellbinders — as well as Lacor-
daire. My Nimmo is a typical spellbinder. Bonser was a spell-
binder in business, the man of imagination. He was also a crook,
but so are many spellbinders. Poets have starts most of the revo-
lutions, especially nationalist revolutions. On the other hand, life
would die without poets, and democracy must have its spell-
binders.

Interviewers: Roosevelt?

Cary; Yes, look what he did — ^aud compare him with Wilson.
Wilson was a good man, but he hadn't the genius of the spell-
binder— the art of getting at people and moving the crowd.

Interviewers: Is Nimmo based on Roosevelt?

Cary: No, he belongs to the type of all of them — ^Juarez, Lloyd
George, Bevan, Sankey and Moody, Billy Graham.

Interviewers: Do you base your characters on people you
know?

Cary: Never, you can’t. You may get s'ngle hints. But real
people are too complex and too disorganized for books. They
aren't simple enough. Look at all the great heroes and heroines,
Tom Jones, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Baron Charlus,
Catherine Linton: they are essentially characters from fable, and
so they must be to take their place in a formal construction which
is to have a meaning. A musician does not write music by trying
to fit chords into his whole. The chords arise from the develop-
ment of his motives.

Interviewers: In one of your prefaces you said, didn’t you,
that Jimson’s father came from life?

Cary; I met an old man, an artist who had been in the Academy
and a success, and was then ruined by the change of taste when
the impressionists created their new symbolic school. But I didn’t
use him in my book, I don’t know anything about his character,
only his tragedy. A very common one in this world. (Suddenly)
'The French seem to take me for an existentialist in Sartre’s sense
of the word. But I’m not. I am influenced by the solitude of men’s
minds, but equally by the unity of their fundamental character
and feelings, their sympathies which bring them together. I be-
lieve that there is such a thing as unselfish love and beauty. I am
obliged to believe in God as a person. I don’t suppose any church
would accept me, but I believe in God and His grace with an
absolute confidence. It is by His grace that we know beauty and

JOYCE CARY 53

love, that we have all that makes life worth living in a tough,
dangerous, and unjust world. Without that belief 1 could not m^e
sense of the world and I could not write. Of course, if you say I
am an existentialist in the school of Kierkegaard, that is more
reasonable. But existentialism without a god is nonsense — ^it
atomizes a world which is plainly a unity. It produces merely
frustration and defeat. How can one explain the existence of per-
sonal feelings, love and beauty, in nature, unless a person, God,
is there? He’s there as much as hydrogen gas. He is a fact of
experience. And one must not run away from experience. I don’t
believe in miracles. I’m not talking here of faith cures — but some
breach in the fundamental consistency of the world character
which is absolutely impossible. I mean absolutely. (With empha-
sis) God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is
nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature
and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.
And we can’t even conceive nothingness. The world is a definite
character. It is, and therefore it is something. And it can’t be any
other thing. Aquinas tells you all the things that God can’t do
without contradicting himself.

Interviewers: But about existentialism.

Cary: Kierkegaard states the uniqueness of the individual and
I stand by that.

Interviewers: That’s what you meant, then, when you said
that what makes men tick should be the main concern of the
novelist? The character’s pnaciple of unity?

Cary: And action, their beliefs. You’ve got to find out what

people believe, what is pushing them on And of course it’s a

matter of the simpler emotional drives — ^like ambition and love.
These are the real stufiF of the novel, and you can’t have any sort of
real form unless you’ve got an ordered attitude towards them.

Interviewers: But the fundamental beliefs are not always the
most apparent, or, it seems to us, the most successful of the
achievements in the novel. We were expecting, for instance, a
much closer analysis of the religious beliefs of Brown in To Be a
Pilgrim. But we felt, in fact, that what came across most success-
fully were the emotional responses of people to people — compel-
ling, for instance, Lucy to follow Brown.

Cary: 'The details were there once. That is. Brown’s arguments
were there, and Lucy’s response. But Lucy was only one character.

WBITBRS AT WORK

one motive in the symphony. And also I was up against the prob-
lem of explicit statement. I may have cut too much, but the book
is long and packed already. The essence of Lucy was her deep
faith. She wasn’t the kind of person who can float along from day
to day like a piece of newspaper or a banana skin in the gutter.
And in the book, I had her feelings expressed. But I cut them
somewhere in the rewriting. I rewrite a great deal and I work
over the whole book and cut out anything that does not belong
to the emotional development, the texture of feeling. I left too
much of the religious argument in Except the Lord and people
criticize it as too explicit or dull.

Interviewers: Do you find in those later stages that you’re
primarily concerned with the more technical side of “form”?
With, for example, managing the flashback? And do you think,
incidentally, that you owe that particular trick to the films? I
believe that you worked on a film in Africa.

Cary: No, I don’t really think it has anything to do with films.
The flashback in my novels is not just a trick. In, for example, The
Moonlight, I used it in order to make my theme possible. It was
essential to compare two generations. You can’t do that without a
flashback contrast; the chronological run-through by itself is no
good.

Interviewers: In the preface to Herself Surprised you men-
tioned a technical difficulty you found yourself in. You wanted
to show everything through the eyes of Sara, but found that to
make her see everything diluted her character. This was the
soliloquy as flashback. This struck us as the same dilemma that
James found himself in when writing What Maisie Knew. Is this a
just parallel? Do you read James?

Cary: Yes, but James is not very remarkable technically. He’s
one of our very greatest novelists, but you will not learn much
by studying his technique. What Matsie Knew, that was one of
the packed ones, wasn’t it? Almost too packed. I enjoyed its in-
tense appreciation of the child’s nature, and the cruel imbecility
of the world in which she was thrown about. But on the whole I
perfer the beautifully clear atmosphere of a book like The Euro-
peans or Daisy Miller — all James is in Daisy Miller.

Interviewers: Have you read The Bostonians? There was the
spellbinder.

Cary: No, I haven’t read that.

JOYCE CABT 55

Interviewers: The Princess Casamassima?

Cary: I’m afraid I haven’t read that either. Cecil is always
telling me to read her and I must. But I read James a good de^.
There are times you need James, just as there are times when you
must have Proust — in his very Cerent world of change. The
essential thing about James is that he came into a different, a
highly organized, a hieratic society, and for him it was not only a
very good and highly civilized society, but static. It was the best
the world could do. But it was already subject to corruption. This
was the centre of James’ moral idea — that everytliing good was,
for that reason, specially liable to corruption. Any kind of good-
ness, integrity of character, exposed that person to ruin. And the
whole civilization, because it was a real civilization, cultivated
and sensitive, was fearfully exposed to frauds and go-getters,
brutes and grabbers. This was his tragic theme. But my world is
quite different — it is intensely dynamic, a world in creation. In
this world, politics is like navigation in a sea without charts and
wise men live the lives of pilgrims.

Interviewers: Have you sympathy with those who most un-
compromisingly pursue their own free idea whatever the opposi-
tion?

Cary: I don’t put a premium on aggression. Oh, no, no, no. I’m
no life-force man. Critics write about my vitality. What is vitality?
As a principle it is a lot of balls. The life force is rubbish, an
abstraction, an idea without character. Shaw’s tale of life force is
either senseless rubbish or he really means Shaw — Shaw as God’s
mind. The life force doesn’t exist. Show me some in a bottle. The
life of the world is the nature of God, and God is as real as the
trees.

Interviewers: Which novelists do you think have most in-
fluenced you?

Cary: Influenced? Oh, lots. Hundreds. Conrad had a great deal
at one point. I’ve got a novel upstairs I wrote forty years ago in
Africa, under his influence. But I read very few novels nowa^ys.

I read memoirs and history. And the classics. I’ve got tliem at my
fingertips and I can turn up the points I want. I don’t read many
modem novels, I haven’t time, but those I do read are often very
good. There is plenty of good work being done, and in Britain the
public for good work has enormously increased in my lifetime —
especially in the last thirty years.

WRITERS AT WORK

Interviewers: Do you find, then, that conversation with the
novelists of today helps?

Cary: Conversation?

Interviewers: I mean apart from the person^ stimulus, do you
find that what they have to say helps to resolve technical prob-
lems?

Cary: Oh, no. Not particularly. We chatter. But you have to
work problems out for yourself, on paper. Put the stuff down and
read it — to see if it works. Construction is a complicated job-
later I’ll show you my apparatus.

Interviewers: Is there only one way to get a thing right? How
close is form?

Cary: That’s a difficult question. Often you have very little
room for manoeuvre. See Proust’s letter to Mme Schiff about
Swann, saying he had to make Swann ridiculous. A novelist is
often in Proust’s jam.

Interviewers: You are a determinist — ^you think even novelists
are pushed by circumstances?

Cary: Everyone but a lunatic has reason for what he does. Yes,
in that sense I am a determinist. But I believe, with Kant, that
the mind is self-determined. That is, I believe intensely in the
creative freedom of the mind. That is indeed absolutely essential
to man’s security in a chaotic world of change. He is faced all the
time with unique complex problems. To sum them up for action
is an act of creative imagination. lie fits the different elements
together in a coherent whole and invents a rational act to deal
with it. He requires to be free, he requires his independence and
solitude of mind, he requires his freedom of mind and imagina-
tion. Free will is another matter — it is a term, or rather a contra-
diction in terms, which leads to continual trouble. The will is
never free — it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is
simply the engine in the car — it can’t steer. It is the mind, the
reason, the imagination that steers.

Of course, anyone can deny the freedom of the mind. He can
argue that our ideas are conditioned. But anyone who argues so
must not stop there. He must deny all freedom and say that the
world is simply an elaborate kind of clock. He must be a be-
haviourist. There is no alternative, in logic, between behaviour-
ism, mechanism, and the personal God who is the soul of beauty,
love, and truth. And if you believe in behaviourism, none of these

JOYCE CABY 57

things has any real existence. They are cogwheels in the clock,
and you yourself do not exist as a person. You are a delusion. So
take your choice. Either it is personal or it is a delusion — a
delusion rather difiSkcult to explain.

Interviewers: How do you fit poetry into this? I once heard you
describe it as “prose cut up into lines.” Would you stick to that?

Cary: Did I say that? I must have been annoying someone.
No, I wouldn’t stick to it.

iNTERviEWERSi Anyway, at what stage of your career did you
decide to write novels rather than anything else?

Cary: What stage? Oh, I’ve been telling stories ever since I
was very small. I’m telling stories now to the children of a friend
of mine. I always tell stories. And I’ve been writing them from
childhood. I told them to other children when I was a child. I
told them at school. I told them to my own children and I tell
them now to the children of a friend.

Interviewers: Aissa Saved was the first one you published?

Cary: Yes, and that was not until I was forty. I’d written many
before, but I was never satisfied with them. They raised political
and religious questions I found I could not answer. I have three
or four of them up there in the attic, still in manuscript.

Interviewers: Was this what made you feel that you needed a
“new education”?

Cary: At twenty-six I’d knocked about the world a good bit and
I thought I knew the answers, but I didn’t know. I couldn’t finish
the novels. The best novel I ever wrote — at least it contained some
of my best stuff — there’s about a million words of it upstairs, I
couldn’t finish it. I found that I was faking things all the time,
dodging issues and letting my characters dodge them.

Interviewers: Could you tell us something about your working
methods?

Cary: Well — I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that
carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience. The first
scene in Prisoner of Grace was that at the railway station, when
Nimmo stops his wife from running away by purely moral pres-
sure. That is, she became the prisoner of grace. When I have the
big scenes sketched I have to devise a plot into which they’ll fit
Of course often they don’t quite fit. Sometimes I have to throw
them out. But they have defined my meaning, given form to the
book. Lastly I work over the whole surface.

WRITERS AT WORK

Interviewers: When does the process, the book, start?

Cary: Possibly years ago — in a note, a piece of dialogue. Often
I don’t know the real origin. I had an odd experience lately whidi
gave me a glimpse of the process, something ^ hadn’t suspected.
I was going round Manhattan— do you know it? •

Interviewers: Not yet.

Cary: It’s an island and I went round on a steamer with an
American friend, Elizabeth Lawrence, of Harper’s. And I noticed
a girl sitting all by herself on the other side of the deck — a girl of
about thirty, wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A
nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles.
I said to my friend, “I could write about that girl — ^what do you
think she is?” Elizabeth said that she might be a schoolteacher
taking a holiday, and asked me why I wanted to write about her.
I said I didn’t really know — I imagined her as sensitive and intel-
ligent, and up against it. Having a hard life but making something
of it, too. In such a case I often make a note. But I didn’t — and I
forgot the whole episode. Then, about three weeks later, in San
Francisco, I woke up one night at four — I am not so much a bad
sleeper as a short sleeper — I woke up, I say, with a story in my
head. I sketched the story at once — it was about an English girl in
England, a purely English tale. Next day an appointment fell
through and I had a whole day on my hands. I found my notes
and wrote the story — that is, the chief scenes and some connecting
tissue. Some days later, in a plane — ideal for writing — I began to
work it over, clean it up, and I thought. Why all these wrinkles?
that’s the third time they come in. And I suddenly realized that
my English heroine was the girl on the Manhattan boat. Some-
how she had gone down into my subconscious, and came up again
with a full-sized story. And I imagine that has happened before.
I notice some person because he or she exemplifies some part of
my feeling about things. The Manhattan girl was a motive. And
she brought up a little piece of counterpoint. But the wrinkles
were the first crude impression — a note, but one that counted too
much in the final writing.

Interviewers: A note

Cary: I was thinking in terms of music. My short stores are
written with the same kind of economy — and no one would pub-
lish them. Some of them, now being published, are twenty years
old. Because each note has to count and it must not be super-

JOYCE CAHY 59

iBuous. A son of mine, a composer, MTote some music for the BBC
lately. The orchestra was smtdl, and the Musicians’ Union wouldn’t
let him conduct. He heard one of the players ask the conductor
what the stuff was Kke. The conductor, no doubt intending to warn
the player, answered, “It’s good, but the trouble is that every
note counts.’’ 1 suppose the editors who rejected me felt like that.
They wanted a litde more fluff.

Interviewebs: You can depend around here on practically
everyone’s having read The Horse’s Mouth. Do you think that’s
because it’s less philosophical? Or just because it’s a Penguin?

Caby: The Horse’s Mouth is a very heavy piece of metaphysical
writing. No, they like it because it’s furmy. The French have de-
tected the metaphysics and are fussing about the title. I want Le
Tuyau increoable — ^the unbustable tip. They say this is unworthy
of a philosophical work and too like a roman policier. I say tant
mieux. But they are unconvinced.

Interviewers: A metaphysical work

Cary: A study of the creative imagination working in symbols.
And symbols are highly uncertain — they also die.

Interviewers: Gully’s picture on the wall then, which is de-
molished, is in its turn a symbol of the instability of the symbol?

Cary: That’s what Mrs. Hardy seems to think. But that would
be allegory. 1 hate allegory. The trouble is that if your books mean
anything, the critic is apt to work allegory in. The last scene of
Gully is a real conflict, not au allegorical one. And it was necessary
to cap the development. It was the catastrophe in a Greek sense.

Ikitoviewebs: The Horse’s Mouth was part of a trilogy. You’re
doing this again now, aren’t you, in A Prisoner of Grace, Except
the Lord, and the third yet to come?

Cary: I was dissatisfied with the first trilogy. I’ve set out this
time with the intention of doing better. I think I am doing better.
The contrasts between the (Merent worlds are much sharper.
When I’d finished A Prisoner of Grace I planned a second book
on political religion, but contemporary religion. And 1 found my-
self bored with the prospect. I nearly threw in the whole plan.
’Then one of my children urged me to go on. And I had the idea
of writing Nimmo’s religion as a young man. This appeared to me
as opening a new world of explanation, and also giving a strong
contrast to the last book. So I got to work. And tried to get at the
roots of left-wing English politics in evangelical religion.

WRITERS AT WORK

Interviewers: And the third?

Cary: It’s going to be called Not Honour More. In it, I deal
with Jim — the lover in A Prisoner of Grace. He is the man of
honour, of duty, of service, reacting against ths politician. But I’ll
show it to you in its present state. Upstairs.

We followed Mr. Cary upstairs two stories to his workshop. It
was a room with a low ceiling. A window at the far end looked
out onto trees. Where the walls downstairs had been covered with
pictures, up here it was all bookcases, containing, it seemed, more
files than books. Mr. Cary went straight to his desk, putting out
sheaves of paper from the shelves over it. They were, one instantly
observed, meticulously organized. The sheaves were numbered
and titled, each chapter in its own envelope. Mr. Cary explained
that these were the “big scenes.” Clipped on the front of each
envelope was a sheet of memoranda indicating what still re-
mained to be done within the chapter, what would be required to
give the finished scene a more convincing build-up. These were
the chapters of the embryonic “Not Honour More.”

Mr. Cary explained that he was now “plotting” the book. There
was research yet to be done. Research, he explained, was some-
times a bore; but it was necessary for getting the political and
social background of his work right. He had a secretary who did
useful work for him in the Bodleian, the University library. He
was at the moment, for example, wanting facts on the General
Strike, and had given his secretary a list of questions to work on.

We asked him if what we had heard was true — that often, as he
worked, his writing would generate another unrelated idea and
he would thus be led to write out a block of about twenty thou-
sand words before returning to the work at hand. Mr. Cary con-
firmed this account; and it was confirmed too by the large book-
case containing nothing but files and boxes of unfinished work. It
was an impressive proliferation of novels and short stories, with
the titles on the spines, unfamiliar titles like The Facts of Life.
One file contained “recent short stories.”

The over-all impression of the room in which he worked, as of
the novelist himself, was of a man who, much as he himself might
eschew the word, radiated “vitality.” He rose, he said, early, and
was always at his desk by nine. We had ourselves already had
more than the period of time he had agreed to give us. As we went

JOYCE CARY 61

downstairs and made again for the sitting-room, he looked
anxiously at his watch; but we were there only to dig quickly
tumng the deep cushions for the behn^ngs that had spilled from
our pockets as we Uhir^ed.

John Burrows
Alex Hamilton

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was bom Dorothy Rothschild in West End, New
Jersey, in 1893, and was educated partly in a convent school.

she worked for Vogue at ten dollars a week; then she became
drama critic for Vanity Fair. Her first collection of verse, Erumeh
Rope, appeared in 1727. That same year she accepted a book-
reviewing stint for The New Yorker, her columns appearing over
the signature "Constant Reader.” She was becoming famous as a
wit among the group that met at the Round Table in the Hotel
Algonquin. There was a time when everything bright or malicious
said in New York was ascribed to Dorothy Pareer.

In 1729 she won the O. Hemy Prize for “Big Blonde,” a story
which was included in her first collection, Laments for the Living
. A second collection of stories was After Such Pleasures
. Here Lies included all her fiction published to that
time. She has written three plays; Close Harmony (with Elmer
Rice ), The Coast of Illyria . and The Ladies of the
Corridor (with Amaud d’Usseau ). Although she prefers the
dramatic form, her plays have never achieved the popularity of
her verse and her short stories. Her collections of verse were all
best-sellers, a rare occurrence in American publishing. They in-
clude Sunset Gun Death and Taxes , and Not So
Deep as a Well, her collected poems
Tne Portable Dorothy Parker , including both verse and
fiction complete, has been one of the most popular volumes in a
famous series. Alexander Woollcott said of her work that it was
“so potent a distillation of nectar and wormwood, of ambrosia
and deadly night-shade, as might suggest to the rest of us that we
write far too much.”

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker lives in a midtown New York hotel. She shares
her small apartment with a youthful poodle which has run of the
place and has caused it to look, as Miss Parker says apologetically,
somewhat “Hogarthian’: newspapers spread about the floor,
picked lamb chops here and there, and a rubber doU — its throat
tom from ear to ear — which Mrs. Parker lobs left-handed from
her chair into comers of the room for the poodle to retrieve — as it
does, never tiring of the opportunity. The room is sparsely deco-
rated, its one overpowering fixture being a large dog portrait, not
of the poodle, but of a sheepdog owned by the author Philip
Wylie and painted by his wife. The portrait indicates a dog of
such size that in real life it must dwarf Mrs. Parker. She is a small
woman, her voice gentle, her tone often apologetic, but occa-
sionally, given the opportunity to comment on matters she feels
strongly about, her voice rises almost harshly, and her sentences
are punctuated with observations phrased with lethal force. Hers
is still the wit which made her a legend as a member of the
Round Table of the Algonquin — a humour whose particular
quality seems a coupling of a brilliant social commentary with a
mind of devastating inventiveness. She seems able to produce the
weU-tumed phrase for any occasion. A friend remembers sitting
next to her at the theatre when the news was announced of the
death of the stolid Calvin Coolidge, "How do they know?” whis-
pered Mrs. Parker.

Readers of this interview, however, will find that Mrs. Parker
has only contempt for the eager reception accorded her wit. “Why,
it got so bad," she has said bitterly, “that they began to laugh
before I opened my mouth.” And she has a similar attitude to-
wards her value as a serious writer. ,

WRITERS AT WORK

But Mrs. Parker is her own worst critic. Her three books of
poetry may have established her reputation as a master of light
verse, but her short stories are essentially serious in tone — serious
in that they reflect her own life, which has beln in many ways an
unhappy one — and also serious in their intention. Franklin P.
Adams has described them in an introduction to her work; “No-
body can write such ironic things unless he has a deep sense of
injustice — injustice to those members of the race who are the
victims of the stupid, the pretentious arid the hypocritical.”

Interviewer: Your first job was on Vogue, wasn't it? How
did you go about getting hired, and why Vogue?

Parker: After my father died there wasn’t any money, I had to
work, you see, and Mr. Crowninshield, God rest his soul, paid
twelve dollars for a small verse of mine and gave me a job at ten
dollars a week. Well, I thought I was Edith Sitwell. I lived in a
boarding house at 103rd and Broadway, paying eight dollars a
week for my room and two meals, breakfast and dinner. Thome
Smith was there, and another man. We used to sit around in the
evening and talk. There was no money, but Jesus we had fun.

Interviewer: What kind of work did you do at Vogue?

Parker: I wrote captions. “This little pink dress will win you a
beau,” that sort of thing. Funny, they were plain women working
at Vogue, not chic. They were decent, nice women — the nicest
women I ever met — but they had no business on such a magazine.
They wore funny little bonnets and in the pages of their magazine
they virginized the models from tough babes into exquisite little
loves. Now the editors are what they should be: all chic and
worldly; most of the models are out of the mind of a Bram Stoker,
and as for the caption writers — my old job — they’re recommend-
ing mink covers at seventy-five dollars apiece for the wooden ends
of golf clubs “ — ^for the friend who has everything.” Civilization is
coming to an end, you understand.

Interviewer; Why did you change to Vanity Fair?

Parker: Mr. Crowninshield wanted me to. Mr. Sherwood and
Mr. Benchley — ^we always called each other by our last names —
were there. Our office was across from the Hippodrome. The
midgets would come out and frighten Mr. Sherwood. He was
about seven feet tall and they were always sneaking up behind
him and asking him how the weather was up there. "Walk down
the street with me,” he'd ask, and Mr. Benchley and I would

DOHOTHY PARKER

leave our jobs and guide him down the street. I can’t tell you, we
had more fun. Both Mr. Benchley and I subscribed to two under-
taking magazines: The Casket and Sunnyside. Steel yourself:
Sunnyside had a joKe column called “From Grave to Gay.” I cut
a picture out of one of them, in colour, of how and where to inject
embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk until Mr. Crown-
inshield asked me if I could possibly take it down. Mr. Crownin-
shield was a lovely man, but puzded. I must say we behaved
extremely badly. Albert Lee, one of the editors, had a map over
his desk with little flags on it to show where our troops were fight-
ing during the First World War. Every day he would get the
news and move the flags around. I was married, my husband was
overseas, and since I didn’t have anything better to do I’d get up
half an hour early and go down and change his flags. Later on, Lee
would come in, look at his map, and he’d get very serious about
spies — ^shout, and spend his morning moving his little pins back
into position,

Interviewer: How long did you stay at Vanity Fair?

Parker: Four years. I’d taken over the drama criticism from
P. G. Wodehouse. Then I fixed three plays — one of them Caesars
Wife, with Billie Burke in it — and as a result I was fired.

Interviewer: You fixed three plays?

Parker: Well, panned. The plays closed and the producers, who
were the big boys — Dillinghei.i, Ziegfeld, and Belasco — didn’t like
it, you know. Vanity Fair was a magazine of no opinion, but I
had opinions. So I was fired. And Mr. Sherwood and Mr. Benchley
resigned their jobs. It was all right for Mr. Sherwood, but Mr.
Benchley had a family — two children. It was the greatest act of
friendship I’d known. Mr. Benchley did a sign, “Contributions
for Miss Billie Burke,” and on our way out we left it in the hall
of Vanity Fair. We behaved very badly. We uiade ourselves dis-
charge chevrons and wore them.

Interviewer: Where did you all go after Vanity Fair?

Parker: Mr. Sherwood became the motion-picture critic for the
old Life. Mr. Benchley did the drama reviews. He and I had an
oifice so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.
We had Parkbench for a cable address, but no one ever sent us
one. It was so long ago— before you were a gleam in someone’s
eyes — ^that I doubt there was a cable.

Interviewer: It’s a popular supposition that there was much

68 WRITERS AT WORK

more communication between writers in the twenties. The Round
Table discussions in the Algonquin, for example.

Parker: I wasn’t there very often — it cost too much. Others
went. Kaufman was there. I guess he was '"sort of funny. Mr.
Benchley and Mr. Sherwood went when they had a nickel. Frank-
lin P. Adams, whose column was widely read by people who
wanted to write, would sit in occasionally. And Harold Ross, The
New Yorker editor. He was a professional lunatic, but I don’t
know if he was a great man. He had a profound ignorance. On
one of Mr. Benchley’s manuscripts he wrote in the margin oppo-
site “Andromache,” “Who he?” Mr. Benchley wrote back, “You
keep out of this.” The only one with stature who came to the
Round Table was Heywood Broun.

Interviewer; What was it about the twenties that inspired
people like yourself and Broun?

Parker: Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said,
“You're all a lost generation.” That got around to certain people
and we all said, “Wheel We’re lost.” Perhaps it suddenly brought
to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that,
though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t.
Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as
they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.

Interviewer: Did the “lost generation” attitude you speak of
have a detrimental effect on your own work?

Parker: Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to
be. Dammit, it was the twenties and we had to be smarty. I
wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had
more sense.

Interviewer: And during this time you were writing poems?

Parker: My verses. I cai»not say poems. Like everybody was
then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay,
unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn
good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated — as anything
once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t
getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent
gesture.

Interviewer: Do you think your verse writing has been of any
benefit to your pro.se?

Parker: Franklin P. Adams once gave me a book of French
verse forms and told me to copy their design, that by copying

DOROTHY PARKER

them I would get precision in prose. The men you imitate in verse
influence your prose, and what I got out of it was precision, all I
realize I’ve ever had in prose writing.

iNTERViEWEn: Hoiv did you get started in writing?

Parker: I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful
children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York —
The Blessed Sacrament. Convents do the same things progressive
schools do, only they don’t know it. They don’t teach you how to
read; you have to find out for yourself. At my convent we did
have a textbook, one that devoted a page and a half to Adelaide
Ann Proctor; but we couldn’t read Dickens; he was vulgar, you
know. But 1 read him and Thackeray, and I’m the one woman
youll ever know who’s read every word of Charles Reade, the
author of The Cloister and the Hearth. But as for helping me' in
the outside world, the convent taught me only that if you spit on
a pencil eraser it will erase ink. And I remember the smell of
oilcloth, the smell of nuns’ garb. I was fired from there, finally,
for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate
Conception was spontaneous combustion.

Interviewer: Have you ever drawn from those years for story
material?

Parker: All those writers who write about their childhoodi
Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same
room with me.

Interviewer: What, then, would you say is the source of most
of your work?

Pari:er: Need of money, dear.

Interviewer: And besides that?

Parker: It’s easier to write about those you hate— just as it’s
easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

Intervdetwer: What about ’’Big Blonde”? Where did the idea
for that come from?

Parker: I knew a lady — a friend of mine who went through
holy hell. Just say I knew a woman once. The purpose of the
writer is to say what he feels and sees. To those who write fan-
tasies— ^the Misses Baldwin, Ferber, Norris — I am not at home.

Interviewer: 'That's not showing much respect for your fellow
women, at least not the writers.

Parker: As artists they’re rot, but as providers they’re oil wells;
they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to

WRITERS AT WORK

do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was
that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three
days looking for the right word. I’m a feminist, and God knows
I’m loyal to my sex, and you must remembeii that from my very
early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was
in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded
through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to
lamp posts to try to get our equality — dear child, we didn’t foresee
those female writers. Or Clare Boothe Luce, or Perle Mesta, or
Oveta Culp Hobby.

Interviewer: You have an extensive reputation as a wit. Has
this interfered, do you think, with your acceptance as a serious
writer?

Parker: I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me
feel guilty. I’ve never read a good tough quotable female humor-
ist, and I never was one myself. I couldn’t do it. A “smartcracker”
they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There’s a
helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth
in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. I didn’t mind
so much when they were good, but for a long time anything that
was called a crack was attributed to me — and then they got the
shaggy dogs

Interviewer: How about satire?

Parker: Ah, satire. That’s another matter. They’re the big boys.
If I’d been called a satirist there’d be no living with me. But by
satirist I mean those boys in the other centuries. The people we
call satirists now are those who make cracks at topical topics and
consider themselves satirists — creatures like George S. Kaufman
and such who don’t even know what satire is. Lord knows, a writer
should show his times, but not show them in wisecracks. Their
stuff is not satire; it’s as dull as yesterday’s newspaper. Successful
satire has got to be pretty good the day after tomorrow.

Interviewer: And how about contemporary humorists? Do you
feel about them as you do about satirists?

Parker: You get to a certain age and only the tried writers are
funny. I read my verses now and I ain't funny. I haven’t been
funny for twenty years. But anyway there aren’t any humorists
any more, except for Perelman. There’s no need for ^em. Perel-
man must be very lonely.

Interviewer: Why is there no need for the humorist?

DOROTHY PARKER

Parker: It’s a question of supply and demand. If we needed
them, we’d have them. The new crop of would-be humorists
doesn’t count. They’re like the would-be satirists. They write about
topical topics. Not Mke Thurber and Mr. Benchley. Those two were
damn well read and, though I hate the word, they were cultured.
What sets them apart is that they both had a point of view to
express. That is important to all good writing. It’s the difference
between Paddy Chayefsky, who just puts down lines, and Clifford
Odets, who in his early plays not only sees but has a point of
view. The writer must be aware of life around him, Carson
McCullers is good, or she used to be, but now she’s withdrawn
from life and writes about freaks. Her characters are grotesques.

Interviewer: Speaking of Chayefsky and McCullers, do you
read much of your own, or the present generation of writers?

Parker: I will say of the writers of today that some of them,
thank God, have the sense to adapt to their times. Mailer’s The
Naked and the Dead is a great book. And I thought William
Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness an extraordinary thing. The start
of it took your heart and flung it over there. He writes like a god.
But for most of my reading I go back to the old ones — ^for comfort.
As you get older you go much further back. I read Vanity Fair
about a dozen times a year. I was a woman of eleven when I first
read it — the thrill of that line “George Osborne lay dead with a
bullet through his head." Sometimes I read, as an elegant friend
of mine calls them, “who-did-its.” I love Sherlock Holmes. My
life is so untidy and he’s so neat. But as for living novelists, I sup-
pose E. M. Forster is the best, not knowing what that is, but at
least he’s a semi-finalist, wouldn’t you think? Somerset Maugham
once said to me, “We have a novelist over here, E. M. Forster,
though I don’t suppose he’s familiar to you.” Well, I could have
kicked him. Did he think I carried a papoose on my back? Why,
I’d go .on my hands and knees to get to Forster. He once wrote
something I’ve always remembered: “It has never happened to
me that I’ve had to choose between betraying a friend and betray-
ing my country, but if it ever does so happen I hope I have die
guts to betray my country.” Now doesn’t that make the Fifth
Amendment look like a bum?

Interviewer: Could I ask you some technical questions? How
do you actually write out a story? Do you write out a draft and
then go over it or what?

WBITERS AT WORK

Parker: It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and
then write it sentence by sentence — ^no first draft. I can’t write
five words but that I change seven.

Interviewer: How do you name your characters?

Parker: The telephone book and from the obituary columns.

Interviewer: Do you keep a notebook?

Parker: I tried to keep one, but I never could remember where
I put the damn thing. I always say I'm going to keep one to-
morrow.

Interview'eb: How do you get the story down on paper?

Parker: I wrote in longhand at first, but I’ve lost it. I use two
fingers on the typewriter. I think it’s unkind of you to ask. I know
so little about the typewriter that once I bought a new one be-
cause I couldn’t change the ribbon on the one I had.

Interviewer: You’re working on a play now, aren’t you?

Parker: Yes, collaborating with Arnaud D’Usseau. I’d like to
do a play more than anything. First night is the most exciting
thing in the world. It’s wonderful to hear your words spoken.
Unhappily, our first play, The Ladies of the Corridor, was not a
success, but writing that play was the best time I ever had, both
for the privilege and the stimulation of working with Mr.
D’Usseau and because that play was the only thing I have ever
done in which I had great pride.

Interviewer: How about the novel? Have you ever tried that
form?

Parker: I wish to God I could do one, but I haven’t got the
nerve.

Interviewer: And short stories? Are you still doing them?

Parker: I’m trying now to do a story that’s purely narrative. I
think narrative stories are the best, though my past stories make
themselves stories by telling themselves through what people say.
I haven’t got a visual mind. I hear things. But I’m not going to do
those he-said she-said things any more, they’re over, honey, they’re
over. I want to do the story that can only be told in the narrative
form, and though they’re going to scream about the rent. I’m
going to do it.

Interviewer: Do you think economic security an advantage to
the writer?

Parker: Yes. Being in a garret doesn’t do you any good unless
you’re some sort of a Keats. The people who lived and wrote well

DOROTHY PARKER

in the twenties were comfortable and easy-living. They were able
to find stories and novels, and good ones, in conflicts that came
out of two million dollars a year, not a garret. As for me. I’d like to
have money. Andll’d like to be a good writer. These two can come
together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable. I’d rather
have money. I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be
darling at it. At the moment, however, I like to think of Maurice
Baring’s remark; ‘Tf you would know what the Lord God thinks
of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it.”
I realize that’s not much help when the wolf comes scratching at
die door, but it’s a comfort.

Interviewer: What do you think about the artist being sup-
ported by the state?

Parker; Naturally, when penniless, I think it’s superb. I think
that the art of the country so immeasurably adds to its prestige
that if you want the country to have writers and artists — ^persons
who live precariously in our country — the state must help. I do
not think that any kind of artist thrives under charity, by which
I mean one person or organization giving him money. Here and
there, this and that — that’s no good. The difference between the
state giving and the individual patron is that one is charity and
the other isn’t. Charity is murder and you know it. But I do think
that if the government supports its artists, they need have no feel-
ing of gratitude — the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the
world — or baskets being brought to them, or apple-polishing.
Working for the state — ^for Christ’s sake, are you grateful to your
employers? Let the state see what its artists are trying to do — ^like
France with the Academic Fran9aise. The artists are a part of
their country and their country should recognize this, so both it
and the artists can take pride in their efforts. Now I mean that, my
dear.

Interviewer: How about Hollywood as provider for the artist?

Parker: Hollywood money isn’t money. It's congealed snow,
melts in your hand, and there you are. I can’t talk about Holly-
wood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to
look back on. I can’t imagine how I did it. When 1 got away from
it I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. “Out there,” I called
it. You want to know what “out there’’ means to me? Once I was
coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about
a block long, and out of the side' window was a wonderfully slinky

WRITERS AT WORK

mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white
sufede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a
bagel with a bite out of it.

Interviewer: Do you think Hollywood d^troys the artist’s
talent?

Parker: No, no, no. I think nobody on earth writes down. Gar-
bage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren’t writing down.
That is their best. If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write
down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that
it’s the best you can do that kills you. I want so much to write well,
though I know I don’t, and that I didn’t make it. But during and at
the end of my life, I will adore those who have.

Interviewer: Then what is it that’s the evil in Hollywood?

Parker: It’s the people. Like the director who put his finger in
Scott Fitzgerald’s face and complained, “Pay you. Why, you
ought to pay us.” It was terrible about Scott; if yoi/d seen him
you’d have been sick. When he died no one went to the funeral,
not a single soul came, or even sent a flower. I said, “Poor son of a
bitch,” a quote right out of The Great Gatsby, and everyone
thought it was another wisecrack. But it was said in dead serious-
ness. Sickening about Scott. And it wasn’t only the people, but
also the indignity to which your ability was put. There was a pic-
ture in which Mr. Bcnchley had a part. In it Monty Woolley had
a scene in which he had to enter a room through a door on which
was balanced a bucket of water. He came into the room covered
with water and muttered to Mr. Benchley, who had a part in the
scene, “Benchley? Benchley of Harvard?" “Yes,” mumbled Mr.
Benchley and he asked, “Woolley? Woolley of Yale?"

Interviewer: How about your political views? Have they made
any difference to you professionally?

Parker: Oh, certainly. Though I don’t think this “blacklist”
business extends to the theatre or certain of the magazines, in
Hollywood it exists because several gentlemen felt it best to drop
names like marbles which bounced back like rubber balls about
people they’d seen in the company of what they charmingly called
“commies.” You can’t go back thirty years to Sacco and Vanzetti.
I won’t do it. Well, well, well, that’s the way it is. If all this means
something to the good of the movies, I don’t know what it is. Sam
Goldwyn said, “How’m I gonna do decent pictures when all my
good writers are in jail?” Then he added, the infallible Goldwyn,

DOROTHY PARKER

“Don’t misunderstand me, they all ought to be hung.” Mr. Gold-
wyn didn’t know about “hanged.” That’s all there is to say. It’s not
the tragedies that^ill us, it’s the messes. 1 can’t stand messes. I’m
not being a smartcracker. You know I’m not when you meet me—
don’t you, honey?

Marion Capron

James Thurber

The second son of a local Republican politician, James Thurber
was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1895. He attended Ohio State
University, where he edited the campus humour magazine and
was elected to the senior honour society. Unable to enlist in the
Army because of a childhood eye injury, he served out World
War II as a code clerk in the United States Embassy in Paris.

Back in Ohio, Thurber covered City Hall for the Columbus Dis-
patch, then returned to Europe, where he started an abortive
novel in a Normandy farmhouse. He took a job at twelve dollars
a week on the European edition of the Chicago Tribune. After
returning to New York in 1726 he worked on the Evening Post, in
his spare time writing sketches for The New Yorker, which re-
jected him twenty times before accepting a short piece on a man
caught in a revolving d- ar. Since then it is in The New Yorker
that the bulk of his work has appeared.

Of the twenty-odd volumes of collected prose and pictures,
T. S. Eliot has written; “It is a form of humour which is also a
way of saying something serious. Unlike so much humour it is
not merely a criticism of manners — that is, of the superficial
aspects of society at a given moment — but something more pro-
found. His writing and also his illustrations are capable of sur-
viving the immediate environment and time out of which they
spring. To some extent they will be a document of the age they
belong to.”

Perhaps the best known of Thurber’s works are: the fantasies.
The White Deer , The Thirteen Clocks The Wonder-
ful O ; his play The Male Animal , which he* wrote
with Elliott Nugent; his cartoon book Men, Women, and Dogs;
the collections. The Thurber Carnival and Thurber Country

and his autobiographical sketches My Life and Hard
Times ' and The Thurber Album

James Thurber

The Hdtel Continental, just down from the Place Venddme on
the Rue Castiglione. It is from here that Janet Planner (Genit)
sends her Paris letter to The New Yorker, and it is here that the
Thurbers usually stay while in Paris. "We like it because the
service is first-rate without being snobbish.”

Thurber was standing to greet us in a small salon whose cold
European formality had been somewhat softened and warmed by
well-placed vases of flowers, by stacks and portable shelves of
American novels in bright dust jackets, and by pads of yellow
paper and bouquets of yellow pencils on the desk. Thurber im-
presses one immediately by his physical size. After years of
delighting in the shy, trapped little man in the Thurber cartoons
and the confused and bewildered man who has fumbled in and
out of some of the funniest books written in this century, we,
perhaps like many readers, were expecting to find the frightened
little man in person. Not at all. Thurber by his firm handgrasp and
confident voice and by the way he lowered himself into his chair
gave the impression of outward calmness and assurance. Though
his eyesight has almost failed him, it is not a disability which one
is aware of for more than the opening minute, and if Thurber
seems to be the most nervous person in the room, it is because he
has learned to put his visitors so completely at ease.

He talks in a surprisingly boyish voice, which is flat with the
accents of the Midwest where he was raised and, though slow in
tempo, never dull. He is not an easy man to pin down with ques-
tions. He prefers to sidestep them and, rather than instructing, he
entertains with a vivid series of anecdotes and reminiscences.

Opening the interview with a long history of the bloodhound,
Thurber was only with some difficulty persuaded to shift to a

*79

WRITERS AT WORE

discussion of his craft. Here again his manner was typical — the
anecdotes^ the reminiscences punctuated with direct quotes and
factual data. His powers of memory are astounding. In quoting
anyone — perhaps a conversation of a dozen ye.vrs before — Thur-
her pauses slightly, his voice changes in tone, and you know what
you’re hearing is exactly as it was said.

Thurber: Well, you know it’s a nuisance — to have a memory
like mine — as well as an advantage. Its . . . well . . . like a whore’s
top drawer. There’s so much else in there that’s junk— costume
jewellery, unnecessary telephone numbers whose exchanges no
longer exist. For instance, I can remember the birthday of any-
body who’s ever told me his birthday. Dorothy Parker — ^August ^
Lewis Gannett — October 3, Andy White — ^July 9, Mrs. White —
September 17. I can go on with about two hundred. So can my
mother. She can tell you the birthday of the girl I was in love with
in the third grade, in 1903. Offhand, just like that. I got my powers
of memory from her. Sometimes it helps out in the most extraordi-
nary way. You remember Robert M. Coates? Bob Coates? He is the
author of The Eater of Darkness, which Ford Madox Ford, called
the first true Dadaist novel. Well, the week after Stephen Vincent
Ben4t died — Coates and I had both known him — ^we were talking
about Ben^t. Coates was trying to remember an argument he had
had with Benet some fifteen years before. He couldn’t remember.
I said, “I can.” Coates told me that was impossible since I hadn’t
been there. “Well,” I said, “you happened to mention it in passing
about twelve years ago. You were arguing about a play called
Swords.” I was right, and Coates was able to take it up from there.
But it’s strange to reach a position where your friends have to be
supplied with their own memories. It’s bad enough dealing with
your own.

Interviewers: Still, it must be a great advantage for the writer.
I don’t suppose you have to take notes.

Thurber: No. I don’t have to do the sort of thing Fitzgerald did
with The Last Tycoon — the voluminous, the tiny and meticulous
notes, the long descriptions of character. I can keep all these
things in my mind. I wouldn’t have to write down “three roses in
a vase” or something, or a man’s middle name. Henry James
dictated notes just the way that I write. His note writing was
part of the creative act, which is why his prefaces are so good. He
dictated notes to see what it was they might come to.

JAMES THURBER 81

Interviewers: Then you don’t spend much time prefiguring
your work?

Thurber: No. I don’t bother with charts and so forth. Elliott
Nugent, on the otfier hand, is a careful constructor. When we
were working on The Male Animal together, he was constantly
concerned with plotting the play. He could plot the thing from
back to front — ^what was going to happen here, what sort of situa-
tion would end the first-act curtain, and so forth. I can’t work that
way. Nugent would say, "Well, Thurber, we’ve got our problem,
we’ve got all these people in the living-room. Now what are we
going to do with them?” I’d say that I didn’t know and couldn’t
tell him until I’d sat down at the typewriter and found out. I don’t
believe the writer should know too much where he’s going. If he
does, he runs into old man blueprint — old man propaganda.

Interviewers: Is the act of writing easy for you?

Thurber: For me it's mostly a question of rewriting. It’s part of
a constant attempt on my part to make the finished version
smooth, to make it seem effortless. A story I’ve been working on
— ^“The Train on Track Six,” it’s called — was rewritten fifteen
complete times. There must have been close to 240,000 words in
all the manuscripts put together, and I must have spent two thou-
sand hours working at it. Yet the finished version can’t be more
than twenty thousand words.

Interviewers: Then it’s rare that your work comes out right the
first time?

Thurber: Well, my wife took a look at the first version of some-
thing I was doing not long ago and said, “Goddamn it, Thurber,
that’s high-school stuff.” I have to tell her to wait until the seventh
draft, it’ll work out all right. I don’t know why that should be so,
that the first or second draft of everything I write reads as if it
was turned out by a charwoman. I’ve only written one piece
quickly. I wrote a thing called "File and Forget” in one
afternoon — ^but only because it was a series of letters just as
one would ordinarily dictate. And I’d have to admit that the last
letter of the series, after doing all the others that one afternoon,
took me a week. It was the end of the piece and I had to fuss
over it.

Interviewers: Does the fact that you’re dealing with humour
slow down the production?

Thurber: It’s possible. With hiimour you have to look out for

WRITERS AT WORK

traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put
down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over
and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having
a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play‘4t down. In fact, if
there’s such a thing as a New Yorker style, that would be it —
playing it down.

Interviewers: Do you envy those who write at high speed, as
against your method of constant revision?

Thurber: Oh, no, I don’t, though I do admire their luck, Hervey
Allen, you know, the author of the big best-seller Anthony Adverse,
seriously told a friend of mine who was working on a biographical
piece on Allen that he could close his eyes, lie down on a bed, and
hear the voices of his ancestors. Furthermore there was some sort
of angel-like creature that danced along his pen while he was
writing. He wasn’t balmy by any means. He just felt he was in
communication with some sort of metaphysical recorder. So you
see the novelists have all the luck. I never knew a humorist who
got any help from his ancestors. Still, the act of writing is either
something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like
it. Even rewriting’s fun. You’re getting somewhere, whether it'
seems to move or not. I remember Elliot Paul and I used to argue
about rewriting back in 1925 when we both worked for the
Chicago Tribune in Paris. It was his conviction you should leave
the story as it came out of the typewriter, no changes. Naturally,
he worked fast. Three novels he could turn out, each written in
three weeks’ time. I remember once he came into the office and
said that a sixty-thousand-word manuscript had been stolen. No
carbons existed, no notes. We were all horrified. But it didn’t
bother him at all. He’d just get back to the typewriter and bat
away again. But for me — writing as fast as that would seem too
facile. Like my drawings, which I do very quickly, sometimes so
quickly that the result is an accident, something I hadn’t intended
at all. People in the arts I’ve run into in France are constantly
indignant when I say I’m a writer and not an artist. They tell me
I mustn’t run down my drawings. I try to explain that I do them
for relaxation, and that I do them too fast for them to be called
art.

Interviewers: You say that your drawings often don’t come out
the way you intended?

Thurber: Well, once I did a drawing for The New Yorker of a

JAMES THURBER 83

naked woman on all fours up on top of a bookcase — a big book-
case. She’s up there near the ceiling, and in the room are her
husband and two other women. The husband is saying to one of
the women, obvioilsly a guest, "This is the present Mrs. Harris.
That’s my first wife up there.” Well, when I did the cartoon
originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight
of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and instead of getthig
in the stairs when I drew my line down, there she was stuck up
there, naked on a bookcase.

Incidentally, that cartoon really threw The New Yorker editor,
Harold Ross. He approached any humorous piece of writing, or
more particularly a drawing, not only grimly but realistically. He
called me on the phone and asked if the woman up on the book-
case was supposed to be alive, stuffed, or dead. I said, “I don’t
know, but I’ll let you know in a couple of hours.” After a while
I called him back and told him I’d just talked to my taxidermist,
who said you can’t stuff a woman, that my doctor had told me a
dead woman couldn’t support herself on all fours. “So, Ross,” I
said, “she must be alive.” “Well, then,” he said, “what’s she doing
up there naked in the home of her husband’s second wife?” I
told him he had me there.

Interviewers: But he published it.

Thurber: Yes, he published it, growling a bit. He had a
fine understanding of huni ur, Ross, though he couldn’t have told
you about it. When I introduced Ross to the work of Peter de
Vries, he first said, “He won’t be good; he won’t be funny; he
won’t know English.” (He was the only successful editor I’ve
known who approached everything like a ship going on the rocks.)
But when Ross had looked at the work he said, “How can you get
this guy on the phone?” He couldn’t have said why, but he had
that bloodhound instinct. The same with editing. He was a won-
derful man at detecting something wrong with a story without
knowing why.

Interviewers: Could he develop a writer?

Thurber: Not really. It wasn’t true what they often said of him
— ^that he broke up writers like matches — ^but still he wasn’t the
man to develop a writer. He was an unread man. Well, he’d read
Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and several other books he
told me about — medical books — and he took the Encyclopaedia
Britannica to the bathroom with him. I think he was about up to

84 WRITERS AT WORK

H when he died. But still his effect on writers was considerable.
When you first met him you couldn’t believe he was the editor of
The New Yorker and afterwards you couldn’t believe that anyone
else could have been. The main thing he wall interested in was
clarity. Someone once said of The New Yorker that it never con-
tained a sentence that would puzzle an intelligent fourteen-year-
old or in any way affect her morals badly. Ross didn’t like that,
but nevertheless he was a purist and perfectionist and it had a
tremendous effect on all of us: it kept us from being sloppy. When
I first met him he asked me if I knew English. I thought he meant
French or a foreign language. But he repeated, “Do you know
English?’’ When I said I did he replied, “Goddamn it, nobody
knows English.” As Andy White mentioned in his obituary, Ross
approached the English sentence as though it was an enemy,
something that was going to throw him. lie used to fuss for an
hour over a comma. He’d call me in for lengthy discii.ssions about
the Thurber colon. And as for poetic licence, he’d say, “Damn
any licence to get things wrong.’’ In fact, Ross read so carefully
that often he didn’t get the sense of your story. I once said: “I
wish you’d read my stories for pleasure, Ross.” He replied he
hadn’t time for that.

Interviewehs: It’s strange that one of ^he main ingredients of
humour — low comedy — has never been accepted for The Netv
Yorker.

Thurber: Ross had a neighbour w<jman’s attitude about it. He
never got over his Midwestern provincialism. His idea was that
se.x is an incident. “If you can prove it,” I said, “v\c can get it in
a box on tlie front page of The New York Times.” Now I don’t
want to say that in private life Ro.ss was a prude. But as regards
the theatre or the printed page he certainly was. For example, he
once sent an office memorandum to us in a sealed envelope. It
was an order: “When you send me a memorandum with four-
letter words in it, seal it. There are women in this office.” I said,
“Yah, Ross, and they know a lot more of these words than you do.”
When women were around he was very conscious of tliem. Once
my wife and I were in his office and Ross was discu.s.sing a man
and woman he knew much better than we did. Ross told us, “I
have every reason to believe that they’re s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g together.”
My wife replied, “Why, Harold Ross, what words you do spell
out.” But honest to goodness, that was genuine. Women are either

JAMES THUHBER 85

good or bad, he once told me, and the good ones must not hear
these things.

Incidentally, rn| telling these things to refresh my memory. I’m
doing a short book on him called “Ross in Charcoal.” I’m putting
a lot of this stuff in. People may object, but after all it’s a portrait
of the man and I see no reason for not putting it in.

Interviewers: Did he have much direct influence on your own
work?

Thuhber: After the seven years I spent in newspaper writing, it
was more E. B. White who taught me about writing, how to clear
up sloppy journalese. He was a strong influence, and for a long
time in the beginning I thought he might be too much of one. But
at least he got me away from a rather curious style I was starting
to perfect — ^tight journalese laced with heavy doses of Henry
James.

Interviewers: Henry James was a strong influence, then?

Thurber: I have the reputation for having read all of Henry
James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

Lnterviewers: But there were things to be learned from him?

Thurber: Yes, but again he was an influence you had to get
over. Especially if you wrote for The New Yorker. Harold Ross
wouldn’t have understood it. I once wrote a piece called “The
Beast in the Dingle” which everybody took as a parody. Actually
it was a conscious attempt to write the story as James would have
written it. Ross looked at it and said: “Goddamn it, this is too
literary; I got only fifteen per cent of the allusions.” My wife and
I often tried to figure out which were the fifteen per cent he could
have got.

You know. I’ve occasionally wondered what James would have
done with our world. I’ve just written a piece — ^“Preface to Old
Friends,” it’s called — in which James at the age of a hundred and
four writes a preface to a novel about our age in which he sum-
marizes the trends and complications, but at the end is so com-
pletely lost he doesn’t really care enough to read it over to find his
way out again.

That’s the trouble with James. You get bored with him finally.
He lived in the time of four-wheelers, and no bombs, and the
problems then seemed a bit special and separate. That’s one
reason you feel restless reading him. James is like — well, I had a
bulldog once who used to drag rails around, enormous ones, six-.

WRITEBS AT WORK

eight-, twelve-foot rails. He loved to get them in the middle and
you’d hear him growling out there, trying to bring the thing
home. Once he brought home a chest of drawers — ^without the
drawers in it. Found it on an ash-heap. Well, he’d start to get
these things in the garden gate, everything finely balanced, you
see, and then crash, he’d come up against the gate posts. He’d get
it through finally, but I had that feeling in some of the James
novels: that he was trying to get that rail through a gate not wide
enough for it.

Interviewers: How about Mark Twain? Pretty much every-
body believes him to have been the major influence on American
humorists.

Thurber: Everybody wants to know if I’ve learned from Mark
Twain. Actually I’ve never read much of him. I did buy Tom
Sawyer, but dammit. I’m sorry, I’ve not got around to reading it
all the way through. I told H. L. Mencken that, and he was
shocked. He said America had produced only two fine novels:
Huck Finn and Babbitt. Of course it’s always a matter of per-
sonal opinion — these lists of the great novels. I can remember
calling on Frank Harris — ^he was about seventy then — when I was
on the Chicago Tribune’s edition in Nice. In his house he had
three portraits on the wall — Mark Twain, Frank Harris, and I
think it was Hawthorne. Harris was in the middle. Harris would
point up to them and say, “Those three are the best American
writers. The one in the middle is the best.’’ Harris really thought
he was wonderful. Once he told me he was going to live to be a
hundred. When I asked him what the formula was, he told me it
was very simple. He said, “I’ve bought myself a stpmach pump
and one half-hour after dinner I pump myself out.’’ Can you
imagine that? Well, it didn’t work. It’s a wonder it didn’t kill him
sooner.

Interviewers: Could we ask you why you’ve never attempted
a long work?

Thurber: I’ve never wanted to write a long work. Many writers
feel a sense of frustration or something if they haven’t, but I don’t.

Interviewers: Perhaps the fact that you’re writing humour
imposes a limit on the length of a work.

Thurber: Possibly. But brevity in any case — whether the work
is supposed to be humorous or not — would seem to me to be
desirable. Most of the books I like are short books: The Red

JAMES THURBER 87

Badge of Courage, The Turn of the Screw, Conrad’s short stories,
A Lost Lady, Joseph Hergesheimer’s Wild Oranges, Victoria
Lincoln’s February ^Ul, The Great Gatsby. . . . You know Fitz-
gerald once wrote Thomas Wolfe: “You’re a putter-inner and I’m
a taker-outer.’’ I stick with Fitzgerald. I don’t believe, as Wolfe
did, that you have to turn out a massive work before being judged
a writer. Wolfe once told me at a cocktail party I didn’t know
what it was to be a writer. My wife, standing next to me, com-
plained about that. “But my husband is a writer,” she said. Wolfe
was genuinely surprised. “He is?” he asked. “Why, all I ever see
is that stuff of his in The New Yorker" In other words, he felt that
prose under five thousand words was certainly not the work of a
writer ... it was some kind of doodling in words. If you said you
were a writer, he wanted to know where the books were, the great
big long books. He was really genuine about that.

I was interested to see William Faulkner’s list not so long ago
of the five most important American authors of this century.
According to him Wolfe was first, Faulkner second — diet’s see, now
that Wolfe’s dead that puts Faulkner up there in the lead, doesn’t
it? — Dos Passos third, then Hemingway, and finally Steinbeck.
It’s interesting that the first three are putter-inners. They write
expansive novels.

Interviewers: Wasn’t . lulkner’s criterion whether or not the
author dared to go out on a limb?

Thurber: It seems to me you’re going out on a limb these days
to keep a book short.

Interviewers: Though you’ve never done a long serious work
you have written stories — ^“The Cane in the Corridor” and “The
Whippoorwill" in particular — ^in which the mood is far from
humorous.

Thurber: In anything funny you write that isn’t close to serious
you’ve missed something along the line. But in those stories of
which you speak there ^was an element of anger — ^something I
wanted to get off my chest. I wrote “The Whippoorwill” after five
eye operations. It came somewhere out of a grim fear in the back
of my mind. I’ve never been able to trace it.

Interviewers: Some critics think that much of your work can
be traced to the depicting of trivia as a basis for humour. In fact,
there’s been some criticism

Thurber: Which is trivia — ^the diamond or the elephant? Any

WRITERS AT WORK

humorist must be interested in trivia, in every little thing that
occurs in a household. It’s what Robert Benchley did so well — ^in
fact so well that one of the greatest fears of ^he humorous writer
is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster
and better by Benchley in 1919. Incidentally, you never got very
far talking to Benchley about humour. He’d do a take-off of Max
Eastman’s Enjoyment of Laughter. “We must understand,” he’d
say, “that all sentences which begin with W are funny.”

Interviewers: Would you care to define humour in terms of
your own work?

Thurber: Well, someone once wrote a definition of the differ-
ence between English and American humour. I wish I could re-
member his name. I thought his definition very good. He said
that the English treat the commonplace as if it were remarkable
and the Amercans treat the remarkable as if it were common-
place. I believe that’s true of humorous writing. Years ago we did
a parody of Punch in which Benchley did a short piece depicting
a wife bursting into a room and shouting “The primroses are in
bloom!” — treating the commonplace as remarkable, you see. In
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” I tried to treat the remarkable
as commonplace.

Interviewers: Does it bother you to talk about the stories on
which you’re working? It bothers many writers, though it would
seem that particularly the humorous story is polished through
retelling.

Thurber: Oh, yes. I often tell them at parties and places. And I
write them there too.

Interviewers: You write them?

Thurber: I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes
my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber,
stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a para-
graph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and
ask, “Is he sick?” “No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.” I
have to do it that way on account of my eyes. I still write occa-
sionally— in the proper sense of the word — using black crayon on
yellow paper and getting perhaps twenty words to the page. My
usual method, though, is to spend the mornings turning over the
text in my mind. Then in the afternoon, between two and five, I
call in a secretary and dictate to her. I can do about two thousand
words. It took me about ten years to learn.

JAMES THURBER 89

Interviewers: How about the new crop of writers? Do you
note any good humorists coming along with them?

Thurber: There ^on’t seem to be many coming up. I once had
a psychoanalyst tell me that the depression had a considerable
effect — ^much worse than Hitler and the war. It’s a tradition for a
child to see his father in uniform as something glamorous — ^not
his father coming home from Wall Street in a three-button sadc
suit saying, “We’re ruined,” and the mother bursting into tears — a
catastrophe that to a child’s mind is unexplainable. There’s been
a great change since the thirties. In those days students used to
ask me what Peter Arno did at night. And about Dorothy Parker.
Now they want to know what my artistic credo is. An element of
interest seems to have gone out of them.

Interviewers: Has the shift in the mood of the times had any
effect on your own work?

Thurber: Well, The Thurber Album was written at a time when
in America there was a feeling of fear and suspicion. It’s quite
different from My Life and Hard Times, which was written earlier,
and is a funnier and better book. The Album was kind of an
escape — going back to the Middle West of the last century and
the beginning of this, when there wasn’t this fear and hysteria. I
wanted to write the story of some solid American characters,
more or less as an exai nle of how Americans started out and
what they should go back to — to sanity and soundness and away
from this jumpiness. It’s hard to write humour in the mental
weather we’ve had, and that’s likely to take you into reminis-
cence. Your heart isn't in it to write anything funny. In the years
1850 to 1853 I did very few things, nor did they appear in The
New Yorker. Now, actually, I think the situation is beginning to
change for the better.

Interviewers: No matter what the “mental climate,” though,
you would continue writing?

Thurber: Well, the characteristic fear of the American writer is
not so much that as it is the process of ageing. The writer looks in
the mirror and examines his hair and teeth to see if they’re still
with him. “Oh my Gn.l," he says, “I wonder how my writing is. I
bet I can’t write today.” The only time I met Faulkner he told me
he wanted to live long enough to do three more novels. He was
fifty-three then, and I think he has done them. Then Hemingway
says, you know, that he doesn’t expect to be alive after sixty. But

WRITERS AT WORK

he doesn’t look forward not to being. When I met Hemingway
with John O’Hara in Costello’s Bar five or six years ago we sat
around and talked about how old we were getting. You see it’s
constantly on the minds of American writers. I’ve never known a
woman who could weep about her age the way the men I know
can.

Coupled with this fear of ageing is the curious idea that the
writer’s inventiveness and ability will end in his fifties. And of
course it often does. Carl Van Vechten stopped writing. The
prolific Joseph Hergesheimer suddenly couldn’t write any more.
Over here in Europe that’s never been the case— Hardy, for in-
stance, who started late and kept going. Of course Keats had good
reason to write, “When I have fears that I may cease to be Before
my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” That’s the great classic
statement. But in America the writer is more likely to fear that his
brain may cease to teem. I once did a drawing of a man at his
typewriter, you see, and all this crumpled paper is on the floor,
and he’s staring down in discouragement. “What’s the matter,” his
wife is saying, “has your pen gleaned your teeming brain?”

Interviewers: In your case there wouldn’t be much chance of
this?

Thurber: No. I write basically because it’s so much fun— even
though I can’t see. When I’m not writing, as my wife knows, I’m
miserable. I don’t have that fear that suddenly it will all stop. I
have enough outlined to last me as long as I live.

George Plimpton
Max Steele

Thornton Wilder

Born in 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, Thornton Niven Wilder
spent his early years in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where his
father was the consul-general. He had an extensive and far-flung
education. He attended schools in Ojai and Berkeley, California,
and Chefoo, China, spent his undergraduate years at Oberlin and
Yale, and took graduate 'vork at both the American Academy in
Rome and Princeton.

Wilder taught French at Lawrenceville
Academy. Writing in his spare time, he finished Cabala .

In 1827 he won critical recognition and a Pulitzer Prize with his
second novel. The Bridge of San Luis Bey. Other novels followed:
The \yoman of Andros , Heavens My Destination ,
and The Ides of March ..

As a playwright Wilder has matched his success as a novelist.
He received Pulitzer Prizes for Our Town and The Skin of
Our Teeth . More recently, he rewrote and turned one of his
few failures, The Merchant of Yonkers t into the long-run
Broadway success, The Matchmaker . He has written a
number of one-act plays which have been collected in two
volumes, The Angel That Troubled the Waters and The Long
Christmas Dinner.

Many universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Kenyon, have
awarded Wilder honorary degrees. His home is in Hamden, Con-
necticut, but he travels widely and has taught or lectured at cul-
tural centres throughout the world.

Thornton Wilder

A national newsmagazine not very long ago in its weekly cover
story depicted Thornton Wilder as an amiable, eccentric itinerant
schoolmaster who wrote occasional novels and plays which won
prizes and enjoyed enormous but somewhat unaccountable suc-
cess. Wilder himself has said, “Ym almost sixty and look it. Tm the
kind of man whom timid old ladies stop on the street to ask about
the nearest subway station. Newsvendors in university towns call
me "professor’ and hotel clerks, "doctor.’ ”

Many of those who have viewed him in the classroom, on the
speaker’s rostrum, on shipboard, or at gatherings have been re-
minded of Theodore Roosevelt, who was at the top of his form
when Wilder was an adolescent, and whom Wilder resembles in
his driving energy, his eiv.husiasms, and his unbounded gregari-
ousness.

It is unlikely that more than a few of his countless friends have
seen Wilder in repose. Only then does one realize that he wears a
mask. The mask is no figure of speech. It is his eyeglasses. As do
most glasses, they partially conceal his eyes. They also distort his
eyes so that they appear larger: friendly, benevolent, alive with
curiosity and interest. Deliberately or not, he rarely removes his
glasses in the presence of others. When he does remove them,
unmasks himself, so to speak, the sight of his eyes is a shock.
Unobscured, the eyes — cold light blue — reveal an intense severity
and an almost forbidding intelligence. They do not call out a
cheerful "Kinder! Kinder!”; rather, they specify: ""I am listening to
what you are saying. Be serious. Be precise.”

Seeing Wilder unmasked is a sobering and tonic experience.
For his eyes dissipate the atmosphere of indiscriminate amiability
and humbug that collects around celebrated and gifted men; the

WRITERS AT WORK

eyes remind you that you are confronted by one of the toughest
and most complicated mincb in contemporary America.

An apartment overlooking the Hudson River in New York City.
During the conversations, which took place on the evening of
December 14, and the following afternoon, Mr. Wilder
could watch the river lights or the river barges as he meditated
his replies.

Interviewer: Sir, do you mind if we begin with a few irrelevant-
— and possibly impertinent — questions, just for a warm-up?

Wilder: Perfectly all right. Ask whatever comes into your head.

Interviewer: One of our really eminent critics, in writing about
you recently, suggested that among the critics you had made no
enemies. Is that a healthy situation for a serious writer?

Wilder (After laughing somewhat ironically): The important
thing is that you make sure that neither the favourable nor the
unfavourable critics move into your head and take part in the
composition of your next work.

Interviewer: One of your most celebrated colleagues said re-
cently that about all a writer really needs is a place to work, to-
bacco, some food, and good whisky. Could you explain to the non-
drinkers among us how liquor helps things along?

Wilder: Many writers have told me that they have built up
mnemonic devices to start them off on each day’s writing task.
Hemingway once told me he sharpened twenty pencils; Willa
Gather that she read a passage from the Bible (not from piety,
she was quick to add, but to get in touch with fine prose; she also
regretted that she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of
1611 were not those she was in search of). My spring-board has
always been long walks. I drink a great deal, but I do not associ-
ate it with writing.

Interviewer: Although military service is a proud tradition
among contemporary American writers, I wonder if you would
care to comment on the circumstance that you volunteered in
despite the fact that you were a veteran of the First World War.
That is to say, do you believe that a seasoned and mature artist is
justified in abandoning what he is particularly fitted to do for
patriotic motives?

Wilder: I guess everyone speaks for himself in such things. I

THORNTON WILDER

felt very strongly about it. I was already a rather old man, was fit
only for staffwork, but 1 certainly did it with conviction. I have
always felt that both enlistments were valuable for a number of
reasons.

One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds him-
self almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in die
arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them,
marries them. I have long felt that portraits of the non-artist in
American literature reflect a pattern, because the artist doesn't
really frequent. He portrays the man in the street as he remem-
bers him from childhood, or as he copies him out of other books.
So one of the benefits of military service, one of them, is being
thrown into daily contact with non-artists, something a young
American writer should consciously seek — ^his acquaintance
should include also those who have read only Treasure Island
and have forgotten that. Since 1800 many central figures in narra-
tives have been, like their authors, artists or quasi-artists. Can
you name three heroes in earlier literature who partook of the
artistic temperament?

Interviewer: Did the young Thornton Wilder resemble George
Brush, and in what ways? .

Wilder: Very much so. I came from a very strict Calvinistic
father, was brought up partly among the missionaries of China,
and went to that splendid • -ollcge at Oberlin at a time when the
classrooms and student life carried a good deal of the pious didac-
ticism which would now be called narrow Protestantism. And that
book [Heavens my Destination] is, as it were, an effort to come to
terms with those influences.

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyse,
weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are,
outgrowing, or trying to reshape. That is a very autobiographical
book.

Interviewer: Why have you generally avoided contemporary
settings in your work?

Wilder: I think you would find that the work is a gradual draw-
ing near to the America I know. I began with the purely fantastic
twentieth-century Rome (I did not frequent such circles there);
then Peru, then Hellenistic Greece. I began, first with Heaven’s
My Destination, to approach the American scene. Already, in the
one-act plays, 1 had become aware of how difiScult it is to invest

WRITERS AT WORK

one’s contemporary world with the same kind of imaginative life
one has extended to those removed in time and place. But I
always feel that the progression is there and ■>. isible; I can be seen
collecting the practice, Ae experience and courage, to present my
own times.

Interviewer: What is your feeling about “authenticity”? For
example, you had never been in Peru when you wrote The Bridge
of San Luis Bey.

Wilder: The chief answer to that is that the journey of the
imagination to a remote place is child’s play compared to a jour-
ney into another time. I’ve been often in New York, but it’s just
as preposterous to write about the New York of 1812 as to write
about the Incas.

Interviewer: You have often been cited as a “stylist.” As a
writer who is obviously concerned with tone and exactness of
expression, do you find that the writing of fiction is a painful and
exhausting process, or do you write easily, quickly and joyously?

Wilder: Once you catch the idea for an extended narration —
drama or novel — and if that idea is' firmly within you, then the
writing brings you perhaps not so much pleasure as a deep absorp-
tion {He reflected here for a moment and then continued.) You

see, my waste-paper basket is filled with works that went a quar-
ter through and which turned out to be among those things that
failed to engross the whole of me. And then, for a while, there’s a
very agonizing period of time in which I try to explore whether
the work I’ve rejected cannot be reoriented in such a way as to
absorb me. The decision to abandon it is hard.

Interviewer: Do you do much rewriting?

Wilder: I forget which of the great sonneteers said: “One line
in the fourteen comes from the ceiling; the others have to be
adjusted around it.” Well, likewise there are passages in every
novel whose first writing is pretty much the last. But it’s the joint
and cement, between those spontaneous passages, that take a
great deal of rewriting.

Interviewer: I don’t know exactly how to put the next ques-
tion, because I realize you have a lot of theories about narration,
about how a thing should be told — theories all related to the de-
cline of the novel, and so on. But I wonder if you would say some-
thing about the problem of giving a “history” or a summary of
your life in relation to your development as a writer.

THORNTON WILDER

Wilder: Let’s try. The problem of telling you about my past
life as a writer is like that of imaginative narration itself; it lies
in the e£Fort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does
not rob those events of their character of having occurred in free-
dom. A great deal of writing and talking about the past is un-
acceptable. It freezes the historical in a determinism. Today’s
writer smugly passes his last judgment and confers on existing
attitudes the lifeless aspect of plaster-cast statues in a museum.
He recounts the past as though the characters knew what was
going to happen next.

Interviewer: Well, to begin— do you feel that you were bom
in a place and at a time, and to a family all of which combined
favourably to shape you for what you were to do?

Wilder: Comparisons of one’s lot with others teaches us nothing
and enfeebles the will. Many bora in an environment of poverty,
disease, and stupidity, in an age of chaos, have put us in their
debt. By the standards of many people, and by my own, these
dispositions were favourable — ^but what are our judgments in such
matters? Everyone is bom with an array of handicaps — even
Mozart, even Sophocles — and acquires new ones. In a famous
passage, Shakespeare ruefully complains that he was not endowed
with another writer’s “scope”! We are all equally distant from the
sun, but we all have a share in it. The most valuable thing I in-
herited was a temperamer*’- that does not revolt against Necessity
and that is constantly renewed in Hope. (I am alluding to Goethe’s
great poem about the problem of each man’s “lot” — the Orphische
Worte.)

Interviewer: Did you have a happy childhood?

Wilder: I think I did, but I also think that that’s a thing about
which people tend to deceive themselves. Gertrude Stein once
said, “Communists are people who fancied that they had an un-
happy childhood.” (I think she meant that the kind of person who
can persuade himself that the world would be completely happy
if everyone denied himself a vast number of free decisions, is the
same kind of person who could persuade himself that in early life
he had been thwarted and denied all free decision.) I think of
myself as having been — aright up to and through my college years
— a sort of sleepwalker. I was not a dreamer, but a muser and a
self-amuser. I have never been without a whole repertory of absorb-
ing hobbies, curiosities, inquiries,* interests. Hence, my head has

WRITERS AT WORK

alwa3rs seemed to me to be like a brightly lighted room, full of
the most delightful objects, or perhaps 1 should say, filled with
tables on which are set up the most engrossing games. 1 have
never been a collector, but the resource that I am describing must
be much like that of a collector busying himself with his coins or
minerals. Yet collectors are apt to be "avid” and competitive,
while I have no ambition and no competitive sense. Gertrude also
said, with her wonderful yes-saying laugh, “Oh, I wish I were a
miser; being a miser must be so occupying.” I have never been
unoccupied. That’s as near as 1 can get to a statement about the
happiness or unhappiness of my childhood. Yet 1 am convinced
that except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an
unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional
gifts. Perhaps I should have been a better man if I had had an
unequivocally unhappy childhood.

Interviewer: Can you see— or analyse, perhaps — ^tendencies in
your early years which led you into writing?

Wilder; I thought we were supposed to talk about the art of
the novel. Is it all right to go on talking about myself this way?

Interviewer: I feel that it’s all to the point.

Wilder: We often hear the phrase, "a winning child.” Winning
children (who appear so guileless) are children who have dis-
covered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calcu-
lated spontaneity are in winning what they want. All children,
emerging from the egocentric monsterhood of infancy — ^“Gimmel
Gimme!” cries the Nero in the bassinet — are out to win their way
— ^from their parents, playmates, from “life,” from all that is
bewildering and inexplicable in themselves. They are also out to
win some expression of themselves as individuals. Some are early
marked to attempt it by assertion, by slam-bang methods; others
by a watchful docility; others by guile. The future author is one
who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of
the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to
his way. This does not necessarily mean that he is highly articu-
late in persuading or cajoling or outsmarting his parents and com-
panions, for this type of child is not usually of the “community”
type — ^he is at one remove from the persons around him. (The
future scientist is at eight removes.) Language for him is the in-
strument for digesting experience, for explaining himself to him-
self. Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in

THORNTON WILDER 99

daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their
style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

Let me digress for a moment: probably you won't want to use it
For a long time I tried to explain to myself the spell of Madame
de S6vign6j she is not devastatingly witty nor wise. She is simply
at one with French syntax. Pbrase, sentence, and paragraph
breathe this e£Fortless at-homeness with how one sees, feels, and
says a thing in the French language. What attentive ears little
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal must have hadi Greater writers than
she had such an adjustment to colloquial speech — Montaigne, La
Fontaine, Voltaire — ^but they had things to say: didactic matter;
she had merely to exhibit the genius in the language. I have
learned to watcli the relation to language on the part of young
ones — ^those community-directed towards persuasion, edification,
instruction; and those engaged (“merely” engaged) in fixing some
image of experience; and those others for whom language is
nothing more than a practical convenience — “Oh, Mr. Wilder, tell
me how I can get a wider vocabulary.”

Interviewer: Well now, inasmuch as you have gone from
story-telling to playwriting, would you say the same tendencies
which produced the novelist produced the dramatist?

Wilder; I think so, but in stating them I find myself involved
in a paradox. A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event,
an action involving hun)i;n beings, is more arresting than any
comment that can be made upon it. On the stage it is always now;
the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past
and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being;
the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity. A
novel is what took place; no self-effacement on the part of the
narrator can hide the fact that we hear his voice recounting, recall-
ing events that are past and over, and which he has selected —
from uncountable others — ^to lay before us from his presiding in-
telligence. Even the most objective novels are cradled in the
authors’ emotions and the authors’ assumptions about life and
mind and the passions. Now the paradox lies not so much in the
fact that you and I know that the dramatist equally has selected
what he exhibits and what the characters will say — ^such an opera-
tion is inherent in any work of art — ^but that all the greatest
dramatists, except the very greatest one, have precisely employed
the stage to convey a moral or rdigious point of view concerning

WRITERS AT WORK

100

the action. The theatre is supremely fitted to say: “Behold! These
things are.” Yet most dramatists employ it to say: “This moral
truth can be learned from beholding this actiosi.”

The Greek tragic poets wrote for edification, admonition, and
even for our political education. The comic tradition in the theatre
carries the intention of exposing folly and curbing excess. Only in
Shakespeare are we free of hearing axes ground.

Interviewer: How do you get around this difficulty?

Wilder: By what may be an impertinence on my part. By be-
lieving that the moralizing intention resided in the authors as a
convention of their times — usually, a social convention so deeply
buried in the author’s mode of thinking that it seemed to him to
be inseparable from creation. I reverse a popular judgment: we
say that Shaw wrote diverting plays to sugar-coat the pill of a
social message. Of these other dramatists, I say they injected a
didactic intention in order to justify to themselves and to their
audiences the exhibition of pure experience.

Interviewer: Is your implication, then, that drama should be
art for art’s sake?

Wilder: Experience for experience’s sake — rather than for
moral improvement’s sake. When we say that Vermeer’s “Girl
Making Lace” is a work of art for art’s sake, we are not saying
anything contemptuous about it. I regard the theatre as the
greatest of aU art forms, the most immediate way in which a
human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be
a human being. This supremacy of the theatre derives from the
fact that it is always “now” on the stage. It is enough that genera-
tions have been riveted by the sight of Clytemnt'stra luring Aga-
memnon to the fatal bath, and Oedipus searching out the truth
which will ruin him; those circumambient tags about “Don’t get
prideful” and “Don’t call anybody happy until he’s dead” are
incidental concomitants.

Interviewer: Is it your contention that there is no place in the
theatre for didactic intentions?

Wilder: The theatre is so vast and fascinating a realm that
there is room in it for preachers and moralists and pamphleteers.
As to the highest function of the theatre, I rest my case with
Shakespeare — Twelfth Night as well as Macbeth.

Interviewer: If you will forgive me. I’m afraid I’ve lost track
of something we were talking about a while back — ^we were talk-

THORNTON WILDER 101

ing about the tendencies in your childhood which went into the
formation of a dramatist.

Wilder: The poipt I’ve been leading up to is that a dramatist
is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at
the shocks «and countershocks among people is quite sufiBciendy
engrossing without having to encase it in comment. It's a form of
tact. It’s a lack of presumption. That’s why so many earnest people
have been so exasperated by Shakespeare: they cannot isolate the
passages wherein we hear him speaking in his own voice. Some-
where Shaw says that one page of Bunyan, “who plants his stan-
dard on the forefront of — ^I-forget-what — ^is worth a hundred by
such shifting opalescent men,”

Interviewer: Are we to infer from what you say that the drama
ought to have no social function?

Wilder: Oh, yes — ^there are at least two. First, the presentation
of what is, under the direction of those great hands, is important
enough. We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to
face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.

Secondly, to be present at any work of man-made order and
harmony and intellectual power — ^Vermeer’s “Lace Maker” or a
Haydn quartet or Twelfth Night — is to be confirmed and
strengthened in our potentialities as man.

Interviewer: I wonder if you don’t hammer your point pretty
hard because actually you have a considerable element of the
didactic in you.

Wilder: Yes, of course. I’ve spent a large part of my life trying
to sit on it, to keep it down. The pages and pages I’ve had to tear
up! I think the struggle with it may have brought a certain kind
of objectivity into my work. I’ve become accustomed to readers’
taking widely different views of the intentions in my books and
plays, A good example is George Brush, whom we were talking
about before, George, the hero of a novel of mine which I wrote
when I was nearly forty, is an earnest, humourless, moralizing,
preachifying, interfering product of Bible-belt evangelism. I re-
ceived many letters from writers of the George Brush mentality
angrily denouncing me for making fun of sacred things, and a
letter from the Mother Superior of a convent in Ohio saying that
she regarded the book as an allegory of the stages in the spiritual
life.

Many thank me for the “comfort” they found in the last act of

writers at work

102

Our Town; others tell me that it is a desolating picture of our
limitation to “realize” life — almost too sad to endure.

Many assured me that The Bridge of San Lutis Rey was a satis-
fying demonstration that all the accidents of life were overseen
and harmonized in providence; and a society of atheists in New
York wrote me that it was the most artful exposure of shallow
optimisms since Candide and asked me to address them.

A very intelligent woman to whom I offered the dedication of
The Skin of Our Teeth refused it, saying that the play was so
defeatist. (“Man goes stumbling, bumbling down the ages.”) The
Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden received its first perfor-
mance, an admirable one, at the University of Chicago. Edna St.
Vincent Millay happened to be in the audience. At the close of
the play she congratulated me at having so well pictured that
“detestable bossy kind of mother.”

Most writers firmly guide their readers to "what they should
think” about the characters and events. If an author refrains from
intruding his point of view, readers will be nettled, but will pro-
ject into the text their own assumptions and turns of mind. If the
work has vitality, it will, however slightly, alter those assumptions.

Interviewer: So that you have not eliminated all didactic inten-
tions from your work after all?

Wilder: I suspect that all writers have some didactic intention.
That starts the motor. Or let us say: many of the things we eat are
c*ooked over a gas stove, but there is no taste of gas in the food.

Interviewer: In one of your Harvard lectures you spoke of — I
don’t remember the exact words — a prevailing hiatus between the
highbrow and lowbrow reader. Do you think a word could appear
at this time which would satisfy both the discriminating reader
and the larger public?

Wilder: What we call a great age in literature is an age in
which that is completely possible: the whole Athenian audience
took part in the flowering of Greek tragedy and Greek comedy.
And so in the age of the great Spaniards. So in the age of Eliza-
beth. We certainly are not, in any sense, in the flowering of a
golden age now; and one of the unfortunate things about the situ-
ation is this great gulf. It would be a very wonderful thing if we
see more and more works which close that gulf between high-
brows and lowbrows.

Interviewer: Someone has said — one of your dramatist col-

THORNTON WILDER

103

leagues, I believe, I can’t remember which one — ^that a writer
deals with only one or two ideas throughout his work. Would you
say your work refletts those one or two ideas?

Wilder: Yes, I think so. I have become aware of it myself only
recently. Those ideas seem to have prompted my work before I
realized it. Now, at my age, I am amused by the circumstance that
what is now conscious with me was for a long tiftie latent. One of
those ideas is this: an unresting preoccupation with the surprise of
the gulf between each tiny occasion of the daily life and tibe vast
stretches of time and place in which every individual plays his
role. By that I mean the absurdity of any single person’s claim to
the importance of his saying, “I lovel” “I suffer!” when one thinks
of the background of the billions who have lived and died, who
are living and dying, and presumably will live and die.

This was particularly developed in me by the almost accidental
chance that, having graduated from Yale in , I was sent
abroad to study archaeology at the American Academy in Rome.
We even took field trips in those days and in a small way took part
in diggings. Once you have swung a pick-axe that will reveal
the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was
once an active, much-travelled highway, you are never quite the
same again. You look at Times Square as a place about which
you imagine some day scholars saying, “There appears to have
been some kind of public t.entre here.”

This preoccupation came out in my work before I realized it.
Even Our Town, which I now see is filled with it, was not so con-
sciously directed by me at the time. At first glance, the play
appears to be practically a genre study of a village in New Hamp-
shire. On second glance, it appears to be a meditation about the
difficulty of, as the play says, “realizing life while you live it.” But
buried back in the text, from the very commencement of the play,
is a constant repetition of the words “hundreds,” “thousands,”
“millions.” It’s as though the audience — no one has ever mentioned
this to me, though — ^is looking at that town at ever greater distances
through a telescope.

I’d like to cite some examples of this. Soon after the play begins,
the Stage Manager calls upon the professor from the geology
department of the state university, who says how many million
years old the ground is they’re on. And the Stage Manager talks
about putting some objects and ‘reading matter into the comer-

WRITERS AT WORK

104

•Stone of a new bank and covering it with a preservative so that it
can be read a thousand years from now. Or as minister presiding
at the wedding, the Stage Manager muses to ht'mself about all the
marriages that have ever taken place — ^“millions of ’em, millions
of ’em . . . Who set out to live two by two . . Finally,among the
seated dead, one of the dead says, “My son was a sailor and used
to sit on the poroh. And he says the light from that star took mil-
lions of years to arrive.” There is still more of this. So that when
finally the heartbreak of Emily’s unsuccessful return to life again
occurs, it is against the background of the almost frightening
range of these things.

Then The Skin of Our Teeth, which takes five thousand years
to go by, is really a way of trying to make sense out of the multi-
plicity of the human race and its affections.

So that I see myself making an effort to find the dignity in the
trivial of our daily life, against those preposterous stretches which
seem to rob it of any such dignity; and the validity of each in-
dividual’s emotion.

Interviewer: I feel that there is another important theme run-
ning through your work which has to do with the nature of love.
For example, there are a number of aphorisms in The Bridge of
San Luis Rey which are often quoted and which relate to that
theme. Do your views on the nature of love change in your later
works?

Wilder: My ideas have not greatly changed; but those aphor-
isms in The Bridge represent only one side of them and are
limited by their application to what is passing in that novel. In
The Ides of March, my ideas are more illustrated than stated.

Love started out as a concomitant of reproduction; it is what
makes new life and then shelters it. It is therefore an affirmation
about existence and a belief in value. Tens of thousands of years
have gone by; more complicated forms of society and of con-
sciousness have arisen. Love acquired a wide variety of secondary
expressions. It got mixed up with a power conffict between male
and female; it got cut off from its primary intention and took its
place among the refinements of psychic life, and in the cult of
pleasure; it expanded beyond the relations of the couple and the
family and reappeared as philanthropy; it attached itself to man’s
ideas about the order of the universe and was attributed to the
gods and God.

THORNTON WILDER

105

I always see beneath it, nevertheless, the urge that strives to-
wards justifying life, harmonizing it — the source of energy on
which life must dlaw in order to better itself. In The Ides of
March I illustrate its educative power (Caesar towards Cleopatra
and towards his wife; the actress towards Marc Antony) and its
power to "crystallize” idealization in the lover (Catullus’s infatua-
tion for the destructive "drowning” Clodia — ^he (livines in her the
great qualities she once possessed). This attitude has so much the
character of self-evidence for me that 1 am unable to weigh or
even "hear” any objections to it. I don’t know whether I am utter-
ing an accepted platitude or a bit of naive nonsense.

Interviewer: Your absorbing interest in James Joyce and Ger-
trude Stein is pretty well known. I wonder if there are any other
literary figures who are of particular interest to you.

Wilder: In present-day life?

Interviewer: Well, past or present.

Wnj>ER: I am always, as I said earlier, in the middle of a whole
succession of very stormy admirations up and down literature.
Every now and then, I lose one; very sad. Among contemporaries,
I am deeply indebted to Ezra Pound and Mr. Eliot. In the past,
I have these last few years worked a good deal with Lope de
Vega, not in the sense of appraisal of his total work, but almost as
a curious and very absorbing game — the pure technical business
of dating his enormo. output of plays. I could go on for ever
about these successive enthusiasms.

Interviewer: Do you believe that a serious young writer can
write for television or the movies without endangering his gifts?

Wilder: Television and Hollywood are a part of show business.
If that young writer is to be a dramatist, I believe that he’s tack-
ling one of the most difficult of all m6tiers — ^far harder than the
novel. All excellence is equally diflScult, but, considering sheer
metier, I would always advise any young writer for the theatre to
do everything — to adapt plays, to translate plays, to hang around
theatres, to paint scenery, to become an actor, if possible. Writing
for TV or radio or the movies is all part of it. There’s a bottomless
pit in the acquisition of how to tell an imagined story to listeners
and viewers.

Interviewer: If that young writer has the problem of earning
a livelihood, is advertising or journalism or teaching English a
suitable vocation?

WRITERS AT WORK

106

Wilder: I think all are unfavourable to the writer. If by day
you handle the English language either in the conventional forms
which are journalism and advertising, or in th*b analysis which is
teaching English in school or college, you will have a double, a
quadruple difficulty in finding your English language at night and
on Sundays. It is proverbial that every newspaper reporter has a
half-finished novel in his bureau drawer. Reporting — ^which can
be admirable in itself — is poles apart from shaping concepts into
imagined actions and requires a totally different ordering of mind
and language. When I had to earn my living for many years, I
taught French. I should have taught mathematics. By teaching
maths or biology or physics, you come refreshed to writing.

Interviewer: Mr. Wilder, why do you write?

Wilder: I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new
book which I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that
would engross me.

Interviewer: Do your books and plays fulfil this expectation?

Wilder: No.

Interviewer: They disappoint you?

Wilder: No, I do not repudiate them. I am merely answering
your question — they do not fulfil that expectation. An author
unfortunately, can never experience the sensation of reading his
own work as though it were a book he had never read. Yet with
each new work that expectation is prompting me. That is why the
first months of work on a new project are so delightful: you see
the book already bound, or the play already produced, and you
have the illusion that you will read or see it as though it were a
work by another that will give you pleasure.

iNTERViEWEn: Then all those other motivations to which other
writers have confessed play no part in your impulse to write —
sharing what experience has taught you, or justifying your life by
making a thing which you hope to be good?

Wilder: Yes, I suppose they are present also, but I like to keep
them below the level of consciousness. Not because they would
seem pretentious, but because they might enter into the work as
strain. Unfortunately, good things are not made by the resolve to
make a good thing, but by the application to develop fitly the one,
specific idea or project which presents itself to you. I am always
uncomfortable when, in “studio” conversation, I hear young
artists talking about “truth” and “humanity” and “what is art,”

THORNTON WILDER

107

and most happy when I hear them talking about pigments or die
timbre of the flute in its lower range or the spelling of dialects or
James’s "centre of consciousness.”

Interviewer: Is there some final statement you would wish to
make aboiit the novel?

Wilder: I’m afraid that I have made no contribution towards
the intention of this series of conversations on the art of the novel.
I think of myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every
writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton
accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection
is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty,
and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the prac-
tice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that
schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in
every fabulist is like the iceberg — ^nine-tenths of him is under
water. Yeats warned against probing into how and why one
writes; he called it “muddying the spring.” He quoted Browning’s
lines:

Where the apple reddens do not pry
Lest we lose our Eden, you and 1.

I have long kept a journal to which I consign meditations about
“the omniscience of the novelist” and thoughts about how time
can be expressed in nar’-^ition, and so on. But I never reread those
entries. They are like the brief canters that a man would take on
his horse during the days preceding a race. They inform the
buried critic that I know he’s there, that I hope he’s constantly
at work clarifying his system of principles, helping me when I’m
not aware of it, and that I also hope he will not intrude on the day
of the race.

Gertrude Stein once said laughingly that writing is merely
“telling what you know.” Well, that telling is as difficult an exer-
cise in technique as it is in honesty; but it should emerge as
immediately, as spontaneously, as undeliberately as possible.

Richard H. Goldstone

William Faulkner

William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi,
where his father was then working as a conductor on the railway
built by the novelist’s great-grandfather Colonel William Falkner
(without the “u”), author of The White Rose of Memphis. Soon
the family moved to Oxford, thirty-five miles away, where young
Faulkner, although he was a voracious reader, failed to earn
enough credits to be graduated from the local high school.

he enlisted as a student flyer in the Royal Canadian Air
Force. He spent a little more than a year as a special student at
the state university, “Oh Miss,” and later worked as postmaster at
the university station until he was fired for reading on the job.

Encouraged by Sherwood Anderson, he wrote Soldiers Pay
. His first widely read book was Sanctuary , a sensa-
tional novel which he says that he wrote for money after his pre-
vious books — ^including Mosquitoes , Sartoris , The
Sound and the Fury , and As I Lay Dying — had failed
to earn enough royalties to support a family.

A steady succession of novels followed, most of them related to
what has come to be called the Yoknapatawpha saga: Light in
August , Pylon , Absalom, Absalom! , TKe Un-
vanquished , The Wild Palms , The Hamlet ,
and Go Down Moses . Since World War II his principal
works have been Intruder in the Dust , - A Fable , and

The Town . His Collected Stories received the American
National Book Award in ., as did A Fable in . In
Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Recently, though shy and .retiring, Faulkner has travelled
widely, lecturing for the United States Information Service.

William Faulkner

This conversation took place in New York City early -

Interviewer: Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that
you don’t like interviews.

Faulkner: The reason I don’t like interviews is that I seem to
react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about
the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may
answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked
tomorrow, the answer may be different.

Interviewer: How about yourself as a writer?

Faulkner: If I had not existed, someone else would have writ-
ten me, Hemingway, Doestoevski, all of us. Proof of that is that
there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shake-
speare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and Midsummer
Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The
artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since
there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have
all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thou-
sand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have
needed anyone since.

Interviewer: But even if there seems nothing more to be said,
isn’t perhaps the individuality of the writer important?

Faulkner: Very important to himself. Everybody else should
be too busy with the work to care about the individuality.

Interviewer: And your contemporaries?

Faulkner: All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So
I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
In my opinion, if I could write all my work, again, I am convinced
that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an
artist. 'That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes

112

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each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he
won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once
he matched the work to the image, the ^eam, nothing would
remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pin-
nacle of perfection into suicide. I’m a failed poet. Mr.ybe every
novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries
the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry.
And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

Interviewer: Is there any possible formula to follow in order to
be a good novelist?

Faulkner: Ninety-nine per cent talent ... 99 per cent dis-
cipline ... 99 per cent work. He must never be satisfied with what
he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and
shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be
better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better
than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t
know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder
why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or
steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Interviewer: Do you mean the writer should be completely
ruthless?

Faulkner: The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will
be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It
anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until
then. Everything goes by the board: honour, pride, decency,
security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to
rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Um”
is worth any number of old ladies.

Interviewer: Then could the lack of security, happiness,
honour, be an important factor in the artist’s creativity?

Faulkner: No. They are important only to his peace and con-
tentment, and art has no concern with peace and contentment.

Interviewer: Then what would be the best environment for a
writer?

Faulkner: Art is not concerned with environment either; it
doesn’t care where it is. If you mean me, the best job that was
ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my
opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him
perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a
roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few

WILLIAM FAULKNER 113

simple accounts and to go once every month and pay off the local
police. The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the
best time of the dyy to work. There’s enough social life in the
evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored;
it gives hin^a certain standing in his society; he has nothing to do
because the madam keeps the books; all the inmates of the house
are females and would defer to him and call him “sir.” All the
bootleggers in the neighbourhood would call him “sir.” And he
could call the police by their first names.

So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace,
whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too
high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood-
presSure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or out-
raged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my
trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Interviewer: Bourbon, you mean?

Faulkner: No, I ain’t that particular. Between scotch and
nothing. I’ll take scotch.

Interviewer: You mentioned economic freedom. Does the
writer need it?

Faulkner: No. The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All
he needs is a pencil and some paper. I’ve never known anything
good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of
money. The good write never applies to a foundation. He’s too
busy writing something. If he isn’t first rate he fools himself by
saying he hasn’t got time or economic freedom. Good art can
come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really
are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they
can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing
can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the
good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time to bother with
success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if
you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat
her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do
the crawling.

Interviewer: Can working for the movies hurt your own
writing?

Faulkner: Nothing can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first-
rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there’s not any-
thing can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not

WRITERS AT WORE

114

first rate, because he has already sold his soul for a swimming-
pool.

Interviewer: Does a writer compromise .,in writing for the
movies?

Faulkner: Always, because a moving picture is by ,its nature a
collaboration, and any collaboration is compromise because that is
what the word imeRns — to give and to take.

Interviewer: Which actors do you like to work with most?

Faulkner: Humphrey Bogart is the one Ive worked with best.
He and I worked together in To Have and Have Not and The
Big Sleep.

Interviewer: Would you like to make another movie?

Faulkner: Yes, I would like to make one of George Orwell’s
1984. I have an idea for an ending which would prove the thesis
I’m always hammering at: that man is indestructible because of
his simple will to freedom.

Interviewer: How do you get the best results in working for
the movies?

Faulkner: The moving-picture work of my own which seemed
best to me was done by the actors and the writer throwing the
script away and inventing the scene in actual rehearsal just before
the camera tinned. If I didn’t take, or feel I was capable of taking,
motion-picture work seriously, out of simple honesty to motion
pictures and myself too, I would not have tried. But I know now
that I will never be a good motion-picture writer; so that work
will never have the urgency for me which my own medium has.

Interviewer: Would you comment on that legendary Holly-
wood experience you were involved in?

Faulkner: I had just completed a contract at MCM and was
about to return home. The director I had worked with said, "If
you would like another job here, just let me know and I will speak
to the studio about a new contract.’’ I thanked him and came
home. About six months later 1 wired my director friend that I
would like another job. Shortly after that I received a letter from
my Hollywood agent enclosing my first week’s paycheque. I was
surprised because I had expected first to get an official notice or
rec^ and a contract from the studio. I thought to myself the con-
tract is delayed and will arrive in the next mail. Instead, a week
later I got another letter from the agent, enclosing my second
week’s paycheque. That began in November 1932 and continued

WILLIAM FAULKNER

115

until May 1983. Then I received a telegram iErom the studio. It
said: William Faulkner, Oxford, Miss. Where are you? MGM
Studio.

I wrote out a telegram: MGM Studio, Culoer City, Califomla.
William Fatdkner.

The young lady operator said, "Where is the message, Mr.
Faulkner?” I said, “That’s it.” She said, “The rute book says that
I can’t send it without a message, you have to say something.” So
we went through her samples and selected — I forget which one-
one of the canned anniversary greeting messages. I sent that. Next
was a long-distance telephone call from the studio directing me to
get on the first aeroplane, go to New Orleans, and ‘report to
Director Browning. I could have got on a train in Oxford and
been in New Orleans eight hours later. But I obeyed the studio and
went to Memphis, where an aeroplane did occasionally go to New
Orleans. Three days later one did.

I arrived at Mr. Browning’s hotel about six p.m. and reported
to him. A party was going on. He told me to get a good night’s
sleep and be ready for an early start in the morning. 1 asked him
about the story. He said, “Oh, yes. Go to room so and so. That’s
the continuity writer. He’ll tell you what the story is.”

I went to the room as directed. The continuity writer was sitting
in there alone. 1 told him who I was and asked him about the
story. He said, “When have written the dialogue I’ll let you
see the story.” I went back to Browning’s room and told him what

had happened. "Go back,” he said, “and tell that so and so

Never mind, you get a good night’s sleep so we can get an early
start in the morning.”

So the next morning in a very smart rented launch all of us
except the continuity writer sailed down to Grand Isle, about a
hundred miles away, where the picture was to be shot, reaching
there just in time to eat lunch and have time to run the hundred
miles back to New Orleans before dark.

That went on for three weeks. Now and then I would worry a
little about the story, but Browning always said, “stop worrying.
Get a good night’s sleep so we can get an early start tomorrow
morning.”

One evening on our return I had barely entered my room when
the telephone rang. It was Browning. He told me to come to his
room at once. I did so. He had a telegram. It said: Faulkner is

116 WBITEBS AT WOBK

fired. MGM Studio. "Don’t worry,” Browning said. “Ill call diat
so and so up this minute and not only make him put you back on
the payroll but send you a written apology.” Tnere was a knock on
the door. It was a page with another telegram. This one said:
Browning is fired. MGM Studio. So I came back home. I presume
Browning went somewhere too. I imagine that continuity writer
is still sitting in a room somewhere with his weekly salary cheque
clutched tightly in his hand. They never did finish the film. But
they did build a shrimp village — a long platform on piles in the
water with sheds built on it something like a wharf. The studio
could have bought dozens of them for forty or fifty dollars apiece.
Instead, they built one of their own, a false one. That is, a plat-
form with a single wall on it, so that when you opened the door
and stepped through it, you stepped right on off to the ocean
itself. As they built it, on the first day, the Cajun fisherman pad-
died up in his narrow tricky pirogue made out of a hollow log. He
would sit in it all day long in the broiling sun watching the strange
white folk building this strange imitation platform. The next day
he was back in the pirogue with his whole family, his wife nursing
the baby, the other children, and the mother-in-law, all to sit all that
day in the broiling sun to watch this foolish and incomprehensible
activity. I was in New Orleans two or three years later and heard
that the Cajun people were still coming in for miles to look at that
imitation shrimp platform which a lot of white people had rushed
in and built and then abandoned.

Intehvieweb: You say that the writer must compromise in work-
ing for the motion pictures. How about his writing? Is he under
any obligation to his reader?

Faulkneb: His obligation is to get the work done the best he
can do it; whatever obligation he has left over after that he can
spend any way he likes. I myself am too busy to care about the
public. I have no time to wonder who is reading me. I don’t care
about John Doe’s opinion on my or anyone else’s work. Mine is the
standard which has to be met, which is when the work makes me
feel the way I do when I read La Tentation de Saint Antoine, or
the Old Testament. They make me feel good. So does watching a
bird make me feel good. You know that if I were reincarnated,
I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him
or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger,
and he can eat anything.

william FAULKNER 117

Interviewer: What technique do you use to arrive at your
standard?

Faulkner: Let tlfe writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is
interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the
writing dode, no short cut. The young writer would be a fool to
follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people
learn only by error. The good artist believes* that nobody is
good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No
matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat
him.

iNTEHViEWEn: Then would you deny the validity of technique?

Faulkner: By no means. Sometimes technique charges in and
takes command of the dream before the writer himself can get his
hands on it. That is tour de force and the finished work is simply a
matter of fitting bricks neatly together, since the writer knows
probably every single word right to the end before he puts the
first one down. This happened with As I lay Dying. It was not
easy. No honest work is. It was simple in that all the material was
already at hand. It took me just about six weeks in the spare time
from a twelve-hour-a-day job at manual labour. I simply imagined
a group of people and subjected them to the simple universal
natural catastrophes, which are flood and fire, with a simple
natural motive to give 'direction to their progress. But then, when
technique does not intervene, in another sense writing is easier
too. Because with me there is always a point in the book where
the characters themselves rise up and take charge and finish the
job — ^say somewhere about page 275. Of course I don’t know what
would happen if I finished the book on page 274. The quality an
artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the
honesty and courage not to kid himself about it. Since none of my
work has met my own standards, I must judge it on the basis of
that one which caused me the most grief and anguish, as the
mother loves the child who became the thief or murderer more
than the one who became the priest.

Interviewer; What work is that?

Faulkner; The Sound and the Fury. I wrote it five separate
times, trying to tell the story, to rid myself of the dream which
would continue to anguish me until I did. It’s a tragedy of two
lost women: Caddy and her daughter. Dilsey is one of my own
favourite characters, because she is brave, courageous, generous,

WBITERS AT WORK

118

gentle, and honest She’s much more brave and honest and
generous than me.

Interviewer: How did The Sound and th^Fury begin?

Faulkner: It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the
time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a
little girl’s drawers in a pear-tree, where she could see through a
window where *her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and
report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below.
By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing
and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible
to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a
book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and
that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless
girl climbing down the rainpipe to escape from the only home she
had, where she had never been offered love or affection or under-
standing.

I had already begun to tell the story through the eyes of the
idiot child, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by
someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why.
I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again,
the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still
not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third
brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together
and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. It was still not
complete, not until fifteen years after the book was published,
when I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get
the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some
peace from it. It’s the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn’t
leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard
and would like to try again, though I'd probably fail again.

Interviewer: What emotion does Benjy arouse in you?

Faulkner: The only emotion I can have for Benjy is grief and
pity for all mankind. You can’t feel anything for Benjy because
he doesn’t feel anything. The only thing I can feel about him per-
sonally is concern as to whether he is believable as I created him.
He was a prologue, like the gravedigger in the Elizabethan
dramas. He serves his purpose and is gone. Benjy is incapable of
good and evil because he had no knowledge of good and evil.

Interviewer: Could Benjy feel love?

Faulkner: Benjy wasn’t rational enough even to be selfish. He

WILLIAM FAULKNER

119

was an animal. He recognized tenderness and love though he
could not have nan^ed them, and it was the threat to tenderness
and love that caused him to bellow when he felt the change in
Caddy. He no longer had Caddy; being an idiot he was not even
aware that Caddy was missing. He knew only that something was
wrong, which left a vacuum in which he grieved. He tried to fill
that vacuum. The only thing he had was one of Caddy’s discarded
slippers. The slipper was his tenderness and love which he could
not have named, but he knew only that it was missing. He was
dirty because he couldn’t co-ordinate and because dirt meant
nothing to him. He could no more distinguish between dirt and
cleanliness than between good and evil. The slipper gave him
comfort even though he no longer remembered the person to
whom it had once belonged, any more than he could remember
why he grieved. If Caddy had reappeared he probably would not
have known her.

Interviewer: Does the narcissus given to Benjy have some
significance?

Faulkner: The narcissus was given to Benjy to distract his
attention. It was simply a flower which happened to be handy that
fifth of April. It was not deliberate.

Interviewer: Are there any artistic advantages in casting the
novel in the form of an allegory, as the Christian allegory you
used in A Fable,

Faulkner: Same advantage the carpenter finds in building
square comers in order to build a square house. In A Fable the
Christian allegory was the right allegory to use in that particular
story, like an oblong square corner is the right comer with which
to build an oblong rectangular house.

Interviewer: Docs that mean an artist can use Christianity
simply as just another tool, as a carpenter would borrow a
hammer?

Faulkner: The carpenter we are speaking of never lades that
hammer. No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we
mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of be-
haviour by means of which he makes himself a better human
being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only.
Whatever its symbol — cross or crescent or whatever — that symbol
is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various
allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and

WRITERS AT WORK

120

learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the
textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover
himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his
capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of
suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope. Writers have
always drawn, and always will draw, upon the allegories of moral
consciousness, for the reason that the allegories are matchless —
the three men in Moby Dick, who represent the trinity of con-
science: knowing nothing, knowing but not caring, knowing and
caring. The same trinity is represented in A Fable by the young
Jewish pilot oflScer, who said, “This is terrible. I refuse to accept
it, even if I must refuse life to do so”; the old French Quarter-
master General, who said, “This is terrible, but we can weep and
bear it”; and the English battalion runner, who said, “This is
terrible. I’m going to do something about it.”

Interviewer: Are the two unrelated themes in The Wild Palms
brought together in one book for any symbolic purpose? Is it as
certain critics intimate a kind of aesthetic counterpoint, or is it
merely haphazard?

Faulkner: No, no. That was one story — the story of Charlotte
Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne, who sacrificed everything for
love, and then lost that. I did not know it would be two separate
stories until after I had started the book. When I reached the end
of what is now the first section of The Wild Palms, I realized sud-
denly that something was missing, it needed emphasis, something
to lift it like counterpoint in music. So I wrote on the “Old Man”
story until “The Wild Palms” story rose back to pitch. Then I
stopped the “Old Man” story at what is now its first section, and
took up “The Wild Palms” story until it began again to sag.
Then I raised it to pitch again with another section of its anti-
thesis, which is the story of a man who got his love and spent the
rest of the book fleeing from it, even to the extent of voluntarily
going back to jail where he would be safe. They are only two
stories by chance, perhaps necessity. The story is that of Charlotte
and Wilbourne.

Interviewer: How much of your writing is based on personal
experience?

FAinjcNER: I can’t say. I never counted up. Because “how much”
is not important. A writer needs three things, experience, observa-
tion, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of

WILLIAM FAULKNER 121

which, can supply the lack of the others. With me a story usually
begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The
writing of the stor^ is simply a matter of working up to that
moment, to explain why it happened or what it caused to follow.
A writer is drying to create believable people in credible moving
situations in the most moving way he can. Obviously he must use
as one of his tools the environment which he knows. I would say
that music is the easiest means in which to express, since it came
first in man s experience and history. But since words are my
talent, I mujst try to express clumsfly in words what the pure
music would have done better. That is, music would express
better and simpler, but I prefer to use words, as I prefer to read
rather than listen. I prefer silence to sound, and the image pro-
duced by words occurs in silence. That is, the thunder and the
music of the prose take place in silence.

Interviewer: Some people say they cant understand your
writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach
would you suggest for them?

Faulkner: Read it four times.

Interviewer: You mentioned experience, observation, and
imagination as being important for the writer. Would you include
inspiration?

Faulkner: I don't know anything about inspiration, because I
don’t know what inspiration is — ^I’ve heard about it, but I never
saw it.

Interviewer: As a writer you are said to be obsessed with vio-
lence.

Faulkner: That’s like saying the carpenter is obsessed with his
hammer. Violence is simply one of the carpenter’s tools. The
writer can no more build with one tool than the carpenter can.

Interviewer: Can you say how you started as a writer?

Faulkner: I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind
of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met
Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the after-
noon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and
sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the fore-
noon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next
day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a
writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to
write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even

WBITERS AT WORK

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forgot that I hadn’t seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he
waUced in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and
said, “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me?*’ I told him I was
writing a book. He said, “My God,” and walked out. When I
finished the book — ^it was Soldier’s Pay — I met Mrs. Anderson on
the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I’d
finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade
with you. If he doesn’t have to read your manuscript he will tell
his publisher to accept it.’’ I said, “Done,” and that’s how I
became a writer.

Interviewer: What were the kinds of work you were doing to
earn that “little money now and then"?

Faulkner: Whatever came up. I could do a little of almost any-
thing— ^run boats, paint houses, fly airplanes. I never needed much
money because living was cheap in New Orleans then, and all I
wanted was a place to sleep, a little food, tobacco, and whisky.
There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn
enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By tempera-
ment I’m a vagabond and a tramp. I don’t want money badly
enough to work for it. In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so
much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the
only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is
work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a
day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is
work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody
else so miserable and unhappy.

Interviewer: You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson,
but how do you regard him as a writer?

Faulkner: He was the father of my generation of American
writers and the tradition of American writing which our succes-
sors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation.
Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them
both.

Interviewer: What about the European writers of that period?

Faulkner: The two great men in my time were Mann and
Joyce. You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Bap-
tist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Interviewer: How did you get your background in the Bible?

Faulkner: My Great-Grandfather Murry was a kind and gende
man, to us children anyway. That is, although he was a Scot, he

WILLIAM FAULKNER 123

was (to us) neither especially pious nor stem either: he was simply
a man of inflexible principles. One of them was, everybody, chil-
dren on up througlr all adults present, had to have a verse from
the Bible ready and glib at tongue-tip when we gathered at die
table for breakfast each morning; if you didn’t have your scripture
verse ready, you didn’t have any breakfast; you would be excused
long enough to leave the room and swot one up (there was a
maiden aunt, a kind of sergeant-major for this duty, who retired
with the culprit and gave him a brisk breezing which carried him
over the jump next time).

It had to be an authentic, correct verse. While we were little, it
could be the same one, once you had it down good, morning after
morning, until you got a little older and bigger, when one morning
(by this time you would be pretty glib at it, galloping through
without even listening to yourself since you were already five or
ten minutes ahead, already among the ham and steak and fried
chicken and grits and sweet potatoes and two or three kinds of
hot bread) you would suddenly find his eyes on you — ^very blue,
very kind and gentle, and even now not stem so much as in-
flexible; and next morning you had a new verse. In a way, that
was when you discovered that your childhood was over; you had
outgrown it and entered the world.

Interviewer: Do you read your contemporaries?

Faulkner; No, the books I read are the ones 1 knew and loved
when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old
friends: the Old Testai' snt, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes — Don
Quixote. I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert,
Balzac — ^he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream run-
ning through twenty books — Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Shakespeare. 1
read Melville occasionally, and of the poets Marlowe, Campion,
Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman.
I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page
one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one
character, just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few
minutes.

Interviewer: And Freud?

Faulkner: Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New
Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I
doubt if Melville did either, and I’m sure Moby Dick didn’t.

Interviewer: Do you ever read mystery stories?

WRITERS AT WORK

124

Faulkner: I read Simenon because he reminds me something
of Chekhov.

Interviewer: What about your favourite dfaracters?

FAxnjoiER: My favourite characters are Sarah Gamp — a cruel,
ruthless woman, a drunkard, opportunist, unreliable^most of her
character was bad, but at least it was character; Mrs. Harris,
Falstaff, Prince Hal, Don Quixote, and Sancho of course. Lady
Macbeth I always admire. And Bottom, Ophelia, and Mercutio
— ^both he and Mrs. Gamp coped with life, didn’t ask any favours,
never whined. Huck Finn, of course, and Jim. Tom Sawyer I never
liked much — an awful prig. And then I like Sut Lovingood, from
a book written by George Harris about 1840 or ’50 in the Ten-
nessee mountains. He had no illusions about himself, did the best
he could; at certain times he was a coward and knew it and wasn’t
ashamed; he never blamed his misfortunes on anyone and never
cursed God for them.

Interviewer: Would you comment on the future of the novel?

Faulkner: 1 imagine as long as people will continue to read
novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of
course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy
man’s capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to
the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.

Interviewer: And how about the function of the critics?

Faulkner: The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics.
The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who
want to write dorft have the time to read reviews. The critic too is
trying to say “Kilroy was here.” His function is not directed
towards the artist himself. The artist is a cut above the critic, for
the artist is writing something which will move the critic. The
critic is writing something which will move everybody but the
artist.

Interviewer: So you never feel the need to discuss your work
with anyone?

Faulkner: No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me
and if it does I don’t need to talk about it. If it doesn’t please me,
talking about it won’t improve it. Since the only thing to improve
it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a
Avriter. I don’t get any pleasure from talking shop.

Interviewer: Gritics claim that blood relationships are central
in your novels.

WILLIAM FAULKNER 125

Fair^kner: That is an opinion and, as 1 have said, I don't read
critics. I doubt that a man trying to write about people is any
more interested in lllood relationships than in the shape of their
noses, unless they are necessary to help the story move. If the
writer conoSntrates on what he does need to be interested in,
which is the truth and the human heart, he wont have much time
left for anything else, such as ideas and facts like the shape of
noses or blood relationships, since in my opinion ideas and facts
have very little connection with truth.

Interviewer: Critics also suggest that your characters never
consciously choose between good and evil.

Faulkner: Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote
was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was
choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only
when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no
time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only
in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is
motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move —
which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote
to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he
is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil
sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him
in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral con-
science is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to
gain from them the right to 'iream.

Interviewer: Could you explain more what you mean by
motion in relation to the artist?

Faulkner: The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is
life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years
later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to
leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always
move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on
the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he
must someday pass.

Interviewer: It has been said by Malcolm Cowley that your
characters carry a sense of submission to their fate.

Faiujcner: That is his opinion. I would say that some of them
do and some of them don’t, like everybody else’s characters. I
would say that Lena Grove in Light in August coped pretty well

126 WRITERS AT .WORK

with hers. It didn’t really matter to her in her destiny whether her
man was Lucas Birch or not. It was her destiny to have a husband
and children and she knew it, and so she wextt out and attended to
it without asking help from anyone. She was the captain of her
soul. One of the calmest, sanest speeches I ever heacd was when
she said to Byron Bunch at the very instant of repulsing his final
desperate and despairing attempt at rape, "Ain’t you ashamed?
You might have woke the baby.” She was never for one moment
confused, frightened, alarmed. She did not even know that she
didn’t need pity. Her last speech for example: "Here I ain’t been
travelling but a month, and I’m already in Tennessee. My, my, a
body does get around.”

The Bundren family in As I Lay Dying pretty well coped with
theirs. The father having lost his wife would naturally need
another one, so he got one. At one blow he not only replaced the
family cook, he acquired a gramophone to give them all pleasure
while they were resting. The pregnant daughter failed this timo
to undo her condition, but she was not discouraged. She intended
to try again, and even if they all failed right up to the last, it
wasn’t anything but just another baby.

Interviewer: And Mr. CoWley says you find it hard to create
characters between the ages of twenty and forty who are sympa-
thetic.

Faulkner: People between twenty and forty are not sympa-
thetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only
knows when it is no longer able to do — after forty. Between
twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more
dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his
capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment
and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s
anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty. The
people around my home who have caused all the interracial ten-
sion— the Milams and the Bryants (in the Emmet Till murder) and
the gangs of Negroes who grab a white woman and rape her in
revenge, the Hitlers, Napoleons, Lenins — all these people are
symbols of human suffering and anguish, all of them between
twenty and forty.

Interviewer: You gave a statement to the papers at the time
of the Emmet Till killing. Have you anything to add to it here?

Faulkner: No, only to repeat what I said before: that if we

WILLIAM FAULKNER

127

Americans are to survive it will have to be because we dioose and
elect and defend to be first of aU Americans; to present to the
world one homogenous and unbroken front, whether of white
Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. Maybe the
purpose of tiiis sorry and tragic error committed in my native
Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to
prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we
in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when
we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what
colour, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.

Interviewer: What happened to you between Soldiers Pay
and Sartoris — ^that is what caused you to begin the Yoknapatawpha
saga?

Faulkner; With Soldiers Pay I found out writing was fun. But
1 found out afterwards that not only each book had to have a
design but the whole output or sum of an artist’s work had to
have a design. With Soldiers Pay and Mosquitoes I wrote for the
sake of writing because it was fun. Beginning with Sartoris I dis-
covered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth
writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust
it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would
have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its
absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I
created a cosmos of my own. 1 can move these people around like
God, not only in space but i’. time too. The fact that I have moved
my characters around in time successfully, at least in my own esti-
ihation, proves to me my own theory that time is a fluid condition
which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of indi-
vidual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. If was
existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. 1 like to think of the
world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that
small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe
itself would collapse. My last book will be the Doomsday Book,
the Golden Book, of Yoknapatawpha County. Then I shall break
the pencil and I’ll have to stop.

Jean Stein

Georges Simenoh

Andr6 Gide, who was writing a study of Georges Simenon s fiction
at the end of his life, called Simenon “perhaps the greatest”
novelist of contemporary France.

Simenon published his first novel, Au Pont des Arches, at seven-
teen, and by writing it in ten days began at once his phenomenal
practice of rapid production. Using at least sixteen pen-names
ranging from Christian Brulls to Com Gut, he began writing scores
of commercial novels — one of them in exactly twenty-five hours —
with the intention of training himself for more serious works. He
shortened the period of training in commercial novels when he
began to write a transitional fiction — his series of books about the
detective Maigret. From the Maigrets he moved on rapidly to the
tense psychological novel of less than two hundred ^ages — ^known
to his thousand of European readers as “a simenon — of which he
has now written more than seventy-five.

Today, except for an infrequent Maigret, he publishes only
serious novels. These books, wnich he writes in French, are not
only translated widely but continually used for movies and
tejevision — ^in adaptations which Simenon does not supervise, for
dramas which he does not see.

Among his novels currently available in English translation are
The Heart of a Man, Stain on the Snow, The Trial of BibS Donge,
The Brothers Rico, and Ticket of Leave. In all, he has published
more than 150 novels under his own name, besides about 350
under various pseudonyms.

Simenon was bom in Belgium in 1903, spent much of his life in
France, and came to live in the United States .

Georges Simenon

Mr. Simenon s study in his rambling white house on the edge of
Lakeville, Connecticut, after lunch on a January day of bright
sun. The room reflects its owner: cheerful, efficient, hospitable,
controlled. On its walls are books of law and medicine, two fields
in which he had made himself an expert; the telephone directories
from many parts of the world to which he turns in naming his
characters; the map of a town where he has fust set his forty-
ninth Maigret novel; and the calendar on which he has X-ed out
in heavy crayon the days spent writing the Maigret — one day to a
chapter — and the three days spent revising it, a labour which he
has generously interrupted for this interview.

In the adjoining office, having seen that everything is arranged
comfortably for her husband and the interviewer. Mme Simenon
returns her attention to tlw business affairs of a writer whose
novels appear six a year and whose contracts for books, adapta-
tions, and translations are in more than twenty languages.

With great courtesy and in a rich voice which gives to his state-
ments nuances of meaning much beyond the ordinary range, Mr.
Simenon continues a discussion begun in the dining-room.

Simenon: Just one piece of general advice from a writer has
been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short
stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time.
I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them
and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is
too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what
I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite.

Interviewer; What do you mean by “too literary”? What do
you cut out, certain kinds of words?

Simenon: Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there

131-

132 WRITERS AT WORE

just to make an e£Fect. Every sentence which is there just for the
sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence — cut it. Every
time I find such a. thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.

Interviewer: Is that the nature of most of your revision?

Simenon: Almost all of it. *

Interviewer: It’s not revising the plot pattern?

Simenon: Ohj I never touch anything of that kind. Sometimes
I’ve changed the names while writing: a woman will be Helen in
tlie first chapter and Charlotte in the second, you know; so in re-
vising I straighten this out. And then, cut, cut, cut.

Interviewer: Is there anything else you can say to beginning
writers?

Simenon: Writing is considered a profession, and I don’t think
it is a profession. I think that everyone who does not need to be a
writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do some-
thing else. Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappi-
ness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.

Interviewer: W’hy?

Simenon: Because, first, I think that if a man has the urge to be
an artist, it is because he needs to find himself. Every writer tries
to find himself through his characters, through all his writing.

Interviewer; He is writing for himself?

Simenon: Yes. Certainly.

Interviewer; Are you conscious there will be readers of the
novel?

Simenon; I know that there are many men who have more or
less the same problems I have, with more or less intensity, and
who will be happy to read the book to find the answer — if the
answer can possibly be found.

Interviewer; Even when the author can’t find the answer do
the readers profit because the author is meaningfully fumbling
for it?

Simenon: That’s it. Certainly. I don’t remember whether I have
ever spoken to you about the feeling I have had for several years.
Because society today is without a very strong religion, without a
firm hierarchy of social classes, and people are afraid of the big
organization in which they are just a little part, for them reading
certain novels is a little like looking through the keyhole to learn
what the neighbour is doing and thinking — does he have the same
inferiority complex, the same vices, the same temptations? This is

GEORGES SIMENON 133

what they are looking for in the work of art. I think many more
people today are insecure and are in a search for themselves.

There are now so few literary works of the kind Anatole France
wrote, for example, you know — ^very quiet and elegant and re-
assuring. Oil the contrary, what people today want are the most
complex books, trying to go into every comer of human natine.
Do you understand what I mean?

Interviewer: I think so. You mean this is not just because today
we think we know more about psychology but because more
readers need this kind of fiction?

SiMENON: Yes. An ordinary man fifty years ago— there are many
problems today which he did not know. Fifty years ago he had
the answers. He doesn’t have them any more.

Interviewer: A year or so ago you and I heard a critic ask that
the novel today return to the kind of novel written in the nine-
teenth century.

SiMENON: It is impossible, completely impossible, I think.
(Pausing): Because we live in a time when writers do not always
have barriers around them, they can try to present characters by
the most complete, the most full expression. You may show love
in a very nice story, the first ten months of two lovers, as in the
literature of a long time ago. Then you have a second kind of
story: they begin to be bored; that was the literature of the end
of die last century. And then, if you are free to go further, the
man is fifty and tries to have another life, the woman gets jealous,
and you have children mixed in it; that is the third story. We are
the third story now. We don’t stop when they marry, we don’t
stop when they begin to be bored, we go to the end.

Interviewer: In this connection, I often hear people ask about
the violence in modem fiction. I’m all for it, but I’d like to ask why
you write of it.

SiMENON: We are accustomed to see people driven to their limit.

•Interviewer: And violence is associated with this?

SiMENON: More or less. (Pausing): We no longer think of a man
from the point of view of some philosophers; for a long time man
was always observed from the point of view that there was a God
and that man was the king of creation. We don’t think any more
that man is the king of creation. We see man almost face to face.
Some readers still would like to read very reassuring novels, novels
which give them a comforting view of humanity. It can’t be done.

WRITERS AT WORE

134

Interviewer: Then if the readers interest you, it is because they
want a novel to probe their troubles? You^ role is to look into
yourself and

SiMENON: That’s it. But it’s not only a question of the artist’s
looking into himself but also of his looking into others with the
experience he has of himself. He writes with sympathy because
he feels that the other man is like him.

Interviewer: If there were no readers you would still write?

Simenon: Certainly. When I began to write I didn’t have the
idea my books would sell. More exactly, when I began to write I
did commercial pieces — ^stories for magazines and things of that
kind — to earn my living, but I didn’t call it writing. But for my-
self, every evening, I did some writing without any idea that it
would ever be published.

Interviewer: You probably have had as much experience as
anybody in the world in doing what you have just called com-
mercial writing. What is the difference between it and non-
commercial?

Simenon: I call “commercial” every work, not only in literature
but in music and painting and sculpture — any art — which is done
for such-and-such a public or for a certain kind of publication or
for a particular collection. Of course, in commercial writing there
are different grades. You may have things which are very cheap
and some very good. The books of the month, for example, are
commercial writing; but some of them are almost’ perfectly done,
almost works of art. Not completely, but almost. And the same
with certain magazine pieces; some of them are wonderful. But
very seldom can they be works of art, because a work of art can’t
be done for the purpose of pleasing a certain group of readers.

Interviewer: How does this change the work? As the author
you know whether or not you tailored a novel for a market, but,
looking at your work from the outside only, what difference would
the reader see? *'

Simenon: The big difference would be in the concessions. In
writing for any commercial purpose you have always to make
concessions.

Interviewer: To the idea that life is orderly and sweet, for
example?

Simenon: And the view of morals. Maybe that is the most im-
portant. You can’t write anything commercial without accepting

GEORGES SIMENON

135

some code. There is always a code — ^like the code in Hollywood,
and in television an(^ radio. For example, there is now a very good
programme on television, it is probably the best for plays. The first
two acts are always first-class. You have the impression of some-
thing completely new and strong, and then at the end the conces-
sion comes. Not always a happy end, but something comes to
arrange everything from the point of view of a morality or philo-
sophy— ^you know. All the characters, who were beautifully done,
change completely in the last ten minutes.

Interviewer: In your non-commercial novels you feel no need
to make concessions of any sort?

Simenon: I never do that, never, never, never. Otherwise I
wouldn’t write. It’s too painful to do it if it’s not to go to the end.

Interviewer: You have shown me the manila envelopes you use
in starting novels. Before you actually begin writing, how much
have you been working consciously on the plan of that particular
novel?

Simenon: As you suggest, we have to distinguish here between
consciously and unconsciously. Unconsciously I probably always
have two or three, not novels, not ideas about novels, but themes
in my mind. I never even think that they might serve for a novel;
more exactly, they are the things about which I worry. Two days
before I start writing a novel I consciously take up one of those
ideas. But even before I consciously take it up I first find some
atmosphere. Today there is a little sunshine here. 1 might remem-
ber such and such a spring, maybe in some small Italian town, or
some place in the French provinces or in Arizona, I don’t know,
and then, little by little, a small world will come into my mind,
with a few characters. Those characters will be taken partly from
people I have known and partly from pure imagination — you
know, it’s a complex of both. And then the idea I had before will
come and stick around them. They will have the same problem I
h8ve in my mind myself. And the problem — ^with those people —
will give me the novel.

Interviewer: This is a couple of days before?

Simenon: Yes, a couple of days. Because as soon as I have the
beginning I can’t bear it very long; so the next day I take my
envelope, take my telephone book for names, and ttdce my town
map — ^you know, to see exactly where things happen. And two
days later I begin writing. And the beginning will be alwa}^ the

WRITERS AT WORK

136

same; it is almost a geometrical problem: I have such a man, such
a woman, in such surroundings. What can«. happen to them to
oblige them to go to their limit? That’s the question. It will be
sometimes a very simple incident, anything which will change
their lives. Then I write my novel chapter by chapter.

Interviewer; What has gone on tihe planning envelope? Not
an outline of the action?

SiMENON: No, no. I know nothing about the events when I begin
the novel. On the envelope I put only the names of the characters,
their ages, their families. I know nothing whatever about the
events that will occur later. Otherwise it would not be interesting
tome.

Interviewer: When do the incidents begin to form?

Simenon: On the eve of the first day I know what will happen
in the first chapter. Then, day after day, chapter after chapter, I
find what comes later. After I have started a novel I write a chap-
ter each day, without ever missing a day. Because it is a strain, I
have to keep pace with the novel. If, for example, I am ill for
forty-eight hours, I have to throw away the previous chapters.
And I never return to that novel.

Interviewer: When you did commercial fiction, was your
method at all similar?

Simenon; No. Not at all. When I did a commercial novel I didn’t
think about that novel except in the hours of writing it. But when
I am doing a novel now I don’t see anybody, I don’t speak to
anybody, I don’t take a phone call — I live just like a monk. All the
day I am one of my characters. I feel what he feels.

Interviewer: You are the same character all the way through
the writing of that novel?

Simenon: Always, because most of my novels show what hap-
pens around one character. The other characters are always seen
by him. So it is in this character’s skin I have to be. And it’s almost
unbearable after five or six days. 'That is one of the reasons my
novels are so short; after eleven days I can’t — it’s impossible. I
have to — It’s physical. I am too tired.

Interviewer: I should think so. Especially if you drive the main
character to his limit.

Simenon: Yes. Yes.

Interviewer: And you are playing this role with him, you

GEOAGES SIMENON 137

SiMENON: Yes, and it’s awful. That is why, before I start a novel
— this may sound foolish here, but it is the truth — generally a few
days before the start of a novel I look to see that I don’t have any
appointments for eleven days. Then I call the doctor. He takes my
blood pressure, he checks everything. And he says, “Okay.”

Intebviewer: Cleared for action.

SiMENON: Exactly. Because 1 have to be sure that 1 am good
for the eleven days.

Interviewer: Does he come again at the end of the eleven
days?

SiMENON: Usually.

Interviewer: His idea or yours?

SiMENON: It’s his idea.

Interviewer: What does he find?

SiMENON: The blood pressure is usually down.

Interviewer: What does he think of this? Is it all right?

SiMENON: He thinks it is all right but unhealthy to do it too
often.

Interviewer: Does he ration you?

SiMENON: Yes. Sometimes he will say, “Look, after this novel
take two months off.” For example, yesterday he said, “Okay,
but how many novels do you want to do before you go away for
the summer?” I said, “Two.” “Okay,” he said.

Interviewer: Fine, I’d like to ask now whether you see any
pattern in the develop.. lent of your views as they have worked out
in your novels,

SiMENON: I am not the one who discovered it, but some critics
in France did. All my life, my literary life, if I may say so, I have
taken several problems for my novels, and about every ten years
I have taken up the same problems from another point of view.
I have the impression that 1 will never, probably, find the answer. I
know of certain problems I have taken more than five times.

• Interviewer: And do you know that you will take those up
again?

Simenon: Yes, I will. And then there are a few problem's — ^if I
may call them problems — ^that I know I will never take again, be-
cause I have the impression that I went to the end of them. I don’t
any more care about them.

Interviewer: What are some of the problems you have dealt
with often and expect to deal with in futiure?

WRITERS AT WORK

138

SiMENON: One of them, for example, which will probably haunt
me more than any other is the problem of coirmunication. I mean
communication between two people. The fact that we are I don't
know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete
communication, is completely impossible between two of those
people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.
When I was a young boy I was afraid of it. I would almost scream
because of it. It gave me such a sensation of solitude, of loneliness.
That is a theme I have taken I don't know how many times. But I
know it will come again. Certainly it will come again.

Interviewer; And another?

Simenon: Another seems to be the theme of escape. Between
two days changing your life completely: without caring at all what
has happened before, just go. You know what I mean?

Interviewer: Starting over?

Simenon: Not even starting over. Going to nothing.

Interview’er: I see. Is either of these themes or another not far
in the ofRng as a subject, do you suppose? Or is it harmful to ask
this?

Simenon: One is not very far away, probably. It is something on
the theme of father and child, of two generations, man coming
and man going. That's not completely it, but I don’t see it neatly
enough just yet to speak about it.

Interviewer: This theme could be associated with the theme of
lack of communication?

Simenon: That’s it; it is another branch of the same problem.

Interviewer: What themes do you feel rather certain you will
not deal with again?

Simenon: One, I think, is the theme of the disintegration of a
unit, and the unit was generally a family.

Interviewer: Have you treated this theme often?

Simenon: Two or three times, maybe more.

Interviewer: In the novel Pedigree?

Simenon: In Pedigree you have it, yes. If I had to choose one of
my books to live and not the others, I would never choose
Pedigree.

Interviewer: What one might you choose?

Simenon: The next one.

Interviewer: And the next one after that?

Simenon: That’s it. It’s always the next one. You see, even tech-

CEORCES SIMENON 139

nically 1 have the feeling now that I am very far away from the
goal. ,

Inhsrviewer: Apart from the next ones, would you be willing
to nominate a published novel to survive?

SiMENON* Not one. Because when a novel is finished I have
always the impression that I have not succeeded. I am not dis-
couraged, but I see — I want to try again.

But one thing — I consider my novels about all on the same
level, yet there are steps. After a group of five or six novels I have
a kind of — don’t like the word “progress” — but there seems to
be a progress. There is a jump in quality, I think. So every five or
six novels there is one I prefer to the others.

Interviewer; Of the novels now available, which one would
you say was one of these?

SiMENON: The Brothers Rico. The story might be the same if
instead of a gangster you had the cashier of one of our banks or a
teacher we might know.

Interviewer: A man’s position is threatened and so he will do
anything to keep it?

Simenon: That’s it. A man who always wants to be on top with
the small group where he lives. And who will sacrifice anything to
stay there. And he may be a very good man, but he made such an
effort to be where he is that he will never accept not being there
any more.

Interviewer: I like ti»e simple way that novel does so much.

Simenon: I tried to do it very simply, simply. And there is not a
single "literary” sentence there, you know? It’s written as if by a
child.

Interviewer: You spoke earlier about thinking of atmosphere
when you first think of a novel.

Simenon: What I mean by atmosphere might be translated by
“the poetic line.” You understand what I mean?

* Interviewer: Is “mood” close enough?

Simenon: Yes. And with the mood goes the season, goes the
detail — at first it is almost like a musical theme.

Interviewer: And so far in no way geographically located?

Simenon: Not at. all. 'That’s the atmosphere for me, because I
try — and I don’t think I have done it, for otherwise the critics
would have discovered it — I try to do with prose, with the novel,
what generally is done with poetry. I mean I try to go beyond the

WRITERS AT WORK

140

real, and the explainable ideas, and to explore the man — ^not
doing it by the sound of the words as the p^,etical novels of the
beginning of the century tried to do. I can’t explain technically
but — I try to put in my novels some things which you can’t ex-
plain, to give some message which does not exist practically. You
understand what I mean? I read a few days ago that T. S. Eliot,
whom I admire very much, wrote that poetry is necessary in plays
having one kind of story and not in plays having another, that it
depends on the subject you treat. I don’t think so. 1 think you
may have the same secret message to give with any kind of
subject. If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put
poetry in everything, necessarily.

But I am probably the only one who thinks there is something
of this kind in my books.

Interviewer: One time you spoke about your wish to write the
“pure” novel. Is this what you were speaking of a while ago —
about cutting out the “literary” words and sentences — or does it
also include the poetry you have just spoken of?

SiMENON: The “pure” novel will do only what the novel can do.
I mean that it doesn’t have to do any teaching or any work of jour-
nalism. In a pure novel you wouldn’t take sixty pages to describe
the South or Arizona or some country in Europe. Just the drama,
with only what is absolutely part of this drama. What I think
about novels today is almost a translation of the rules of tragedy
into the novel. I think the novel is the tragedy for our day.

Interviewer: Is length important? Is it part of your dehnition
of the pure novel?

Simenon: Yes. That sounds like a practical question, but I
think it is important, for the same reason you can’t see a tragedy
in more than one sitting. I think that the pure novel is too
tense for the reader to stop in the middle and take it up the next
day.

Interviewer: Because television and movies and magazines art;
under the codes you have spoken of, I take it you feel the writer
of the pure novel is almost obligated to write freely.

Simenon: Yes. And there is a second reason why he should be. I
think that now, for reasons probably political, propagandists are
trying to create a type of man. I think the novelist has to show
man as he is and not the man of propaganda. And 1 do not mean
only political propaganda; 1 mean the man they teach in the third

GEORGES SlMENON 141

grade of school, a man who has nothing to do with man as he
really is. ^

Interviewer: What is your experience with conversion of your
books for movies and radio?

SlMENON: tThese are very important for the writer today. For
they are probably the way the writer may still be independent.
You asked me before whether I ever change anything in one of
my novels commercially. 1 said, “No.” But I would have to do it
without the radio, television, and movies.

Interviewer: You once told me Cide made a helpful practical
suggestion about one of your novels. Did he influence your work
in any more general way?

SlMENON: I don’t think so. But with Cide it was funny. In 1936
my publisher said he wanted to give a cocktail party so we could
meet, for Cide had said he had read my novels and would like to
meet me. So I went, and Cide asked me questions for more than
two hours. After that 1 saw him many times, and he wrote me
almost every month and sometimes oftener until he died — ^always
to ask questions. When I went to visit him I always saw my books
with so many notes in the margins that they were almost more
Cide than Simenon. I never asked him about them; I was very
shy about it. So now I will never know.

Interviewer: Did he ask you any special kinds of questions?

SlMENON: Everything, but especially about the mechanism of
my — ^may I use the word? .c seems pretentious — creation. And I
think I know why he was interested. I think Cide all his life had
the dream of being the creator instead of the moralist, the philo-
sopher. I was exactly his opposite, and I think that is why he was
interested.

I had the same experience five years before with Count Keyser-
ling. He wrote me exactly the same way Cide did. He asked me to
visit him at Darmstadt. I went there and he asked me questions
for three days and three nights. He came to see me in Paris and
asked me more questions and gave me a commentary on each of
my books. For the same reason.

Keyserling called me an '‘imbScile de g4nie”

iNTERViEWEn: I remember you once told me that in your com-
mercial novels you would sometimes insert a non-commercial
passage or chapter.

SlMENON: Yes, to train myself.

WRITERS AT WORK

142

Interviewer: How did that part differ from the rest of the
novel?

Simenon: Instead of writing just the story, in this chapter I
tried to give a third dimension, not necessarily to the whole chap-
ter, perhaps to a room, to a chair, to some object It would be
easier to explain it in the terms of painting.

Interviewer: How?

Simenon: To give the weight. A commercial painter paints flat;
you can put your finger through. But a painter — for example, an
apple by Cezanne has weight. And it has juice, everything, with
just three strokes. I tried to give to my word.« just the weight that
a stroke of Cezanne’s gave to an apple. That is why most of the
time I use concrete words. I try to avoid abstract words, or poetical
words, you know, like “creptiscule,” for example. It is very nice,
but it gives nothing. Do you understand? To avoid every stroke
which does not give something to this third dimension.

On this point, I think that what the critics call my “atmosphere”
is nothing but the impressionism of the painter adapted to litera-
ture. My childhood was spent at the time of the impressionists and I
was always in the museums and exhibitions. That gave me a kind
of sense of it. I was haunted by it.

Interviewer: Have you ever dictated fiction, commercial or
any other?

Simenon: No. I am an artisan; I need to work with my hands. I
would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters —
I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional. And
I would like to make a man so that everybody, looking at him,
would find his own problems in this man. That’s why I spoke
about poetry, because this goal looks more like a poet’s goal than
the goal of a novelist. My characters have a profession, have char-
acteristics; you know — their age, their family situation, and every-
thing. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a
statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world. (Pausing^
And what makes me happy is the letters I get. They never speak
about my beautiful style; they are the letters a m:»ri would write
to his doctor or his psychoanalyst. They say, “You are one who
understands me. So many times I find myself in your novels.” Then
there are pages of their confidences; and they are not crazy
people. There are crazy people too, of course; but many are on the
contrary people who — even important people. I am surprised.

GEORGES SIMENON 143

Interviewer: Early in your life did any particular book or
author especially inmress you?

SiMENON: Probabij^the one who impressed me most was GogoL
And certainly Dostbevski, but less than Gogol.

Interviewer: Why do you think Gogol interested you?

SiMENON: Maybe because he makes characters who are just like
everyday people but at the same time have what I called a few
minutes ago the third dimension I am looking for. All of them
have this poetic aura. But not the Oscar Wilde kind — a poetry
which comes naturally, which is there, the kind Conrad has.
Each character has the weight of sculpture, it is so heavy, so
dense.

Interviewer: Dostoevski said of himself and some of his fellow
writers that they came out from Gogol’s Overcoat, and now you
feel you do too.

SiMENON: Yes. Gogol. And Dostoevski.

Interviewer: When you and 1 were discussing a particular trial
while it was going on a year or two ago, you said you often fol-
lowed such newspaper accounts with interest. Do you ever in
following them say to yourself, “This is something I might some
day work into a novel”?

SiMENON: Yes.

Interviewer: Do you consciously file it away?

SiMENON: No. I just forget 1 said it might be useful some day,
and three or four or ten yesus later it comes. I don’t keep a file.

Interviewer: Speaking of trials, what wo.uld you say is the
fundamental difference, if there is any, between your detective
fiction — ^such as the Maigret which you finished a few days ago—
and your more serious novels?

SiMENON: Exactly the same difference that exists between the
painting of a painter and the sketch he will make for his pleasure
or for his friends or to study something.

• Interviewer: In the Maigrets you look at the character only
from the point of view of the detective?

SiMENON: Yes. Maigret can’t go inside a character. He will see,
explain, and understand; but he does not give the character the
weight the character should have in another of my novels.

Interviewer: So in the eleven days spent writing a Maigret
novel your blood pressure does not change much?

SiMENON: No. Very little.

WRITERS AT WORK

144

Interviewer: You are not driving the detective to the limit of
his endurance.

Simenon: That’s it. So I only have the natural fatigue of being
so many hours at the typewriter. But otherwise, no.

Interviewer: One more question, if I may. Ha^ published
general criticism ever in any way made you consciously change
Ae way you write? From what you say I should imagine not.

Simenon: Never. {Pausing, and looking down) I have a veiy,
very strong will about my writing, and I will go my way. For in-
stance, all the critics for twenty years have said the same thing:
“It is time for Simenon to give us a big novel, a novel with twenty
or thirty characters.” They do not understand. I will never write a
big novel. My big novel is the mosaic of all my small novels.
{Looking up) You understand?

Carvel Collins

Frank O’Connor

Frank O’Connor was born Michael Francis O’Donovan in 1903,
in Cork, Ireland. His family was too poor to afford any education
to speak of for him. But by the time he was twelve he had learned
Gaelic from his grandmother, was puzzling out Goethe with the
aid of a dictionary, and had written enough to form a collected
edition of his own work.

His writing continued through years spent as a travelling
teacher of Gaelic, librarian in Dublin, manager of the Abbey
Theatre, and even during an eighteen-month imprisonment for in-
volvement in the Free State agitation of 1903-05. He has written
poetry, plays, and a book on Shakespeare, but he is primarily
known for his short stories. In praising them, William Butler Yeats
spoke of their author as “doing for Ireland what Chekhov did for
Russia.”

• Since the publication of “Guests of the Nation” in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1901, over one hundred of O’Connor’s short stories
have been published in the United States. Six book-length collec-
tions have appeared, of which Domestic Relations is the last, pub-
lished in 1907. Among his best-known stories are “The Long Road
to Ummera,” “The Holy Door,” “First Confession,” and “Don
Juan’s Temptation.”

O’Connor has lived in the United States since 1902, often absent
from his Brooklyn home on extensiye lecture tours across America.

Frank O’Connor

Frank (yConnor is of medium height and buUd; he has heavy
silver hair, brushed hack; dark, heavy eyebrows; and a moustache.
His voice is bass-baritone in pitch and very resonant — what has
been described as juke-box bass. His accent is Irish, but with no
suggestion of the “fannel-mouth,”' his intonation musical. He
enjoys talk and needed no urging regarding the subject of the
interview. His clothes tend towards the tweedy and casual; desert
boots, corduroy jacket, rough tweed topcoat; and a bit of Cali-
fomia touch evident in a heavy silver ornament hung on a cord
around his neck in place of a tie.

Although a friendly and approachable man, O’Connor has a
way of appraising you on early meetings which suggests the Irish-
man who would just as soc ' knock you down as look at you if he
doesn't like what he sees. His wife provides a description of an
encounter with a group of loitering teenagers while the two of
them were out for a walk. A remark of some sort was made,
O'Connor whipped over to them and told them to get home if
they knew what was good for them. The boys took him in, silvery
hair and all, and moved of.

O'Connor's apartment is in Brooklyn, where he lives with his
pretty young American wife. The large white-walled modem
hving-room has a wide comer view of lower Manhattan and New
York Harbour. The Brooklyn Bridge sweeps away across the river
from a point close at hand. On his table, just under the window
looking out on the harbour, are a typewriter, a small litter of
papers, and a pair of binoculars. The binoculars are for watching
liners "on their way to Ireland," to which he returns once a year.
He says he'd die if he didn't.

Interviewer: What determined you to become a writer?

147

WRITERS AT WORK

148

O’Connor: I’ve never been anything else. From the time I was
nine or ten, it was a toss-up whether I was gcjm’ to be a writer or
a painter, and I discovered by the time I was sixteen or seventeen
that paints cost too much money, so I became a writer because
you could be a writer with a pencil and a penny notdbook. I did
at one time get a scholarship to Paris, but I aiuldn’t afford to take
it up because of the family. That’s where my life changed its
course; otherwise I’d have been a painter. I have a very strongly
developed imitative instinct, which I notice is shared by some of
my children. I always wrote down bits of music that impressed me
in staff notation, though I couldn’t read staff notation — I didn’t
learn to read it until I was thirty-five — but this always gave me
the air of being a musician. And in the same way, I painted. I
remember a friend of mine who painted in water colours and he
was rather shy. He was painting in the city, so he used to get up
at six in the morning when there was nobody to observe him and
go out and paint. And one day he was going in to work at nine
o’clock and he saw a little girl sitting where he had sat, with a can
of water and an old stick, pretending to paint a picture — she’d
obviously been watching him from an upstairs window. That’s
what ! mean by the imitative instinct, and I’ve always Itad that
strongly developed. So I always play at knowing things until, in
fact, I find I’ve learned them almost bv accident.

Lnterviewer: Why do you prefer the short story for your
medium?

O’Connor: Because it’s the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry
— I wrote lyric poetry for a long time, then discovered that God
had not intended me to be a lyric poet, and tlie nearest thing to
that is the short story. A novel actually requires far more logic and
far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can
have the sort of detachment from circiimstances that lyric poetry
has.

Interviewer: Faulkner has said, “Maybe every novelist wanti
to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story,
which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at
that, only then does he take up novel writing.’’ VVhat do you think
about this?

O’Connor: I’d love to console myself, it’s that neat — it sounds
absolutely perfect except that it implies, as from a short-story
writer, that the novel is just an easy sort of thing that you slide

FRANK o’cONNOR 149

gently into, whereas, in fact, my own experience with the novel
is that it was always too difficult for me to do. At least to do a
novel like Pride and Prejudice requires something more than to
be a failed B.A. or a failed poet or a failed short-story writer, or a
failed anytffing else. Creating in the novel a sense of continuing
life is the thing. We don’t have that problem in the short story,
where you merely suggest continuing life. In the novel, you have
to create it, and that explains one of my quarrels with modem
novels. Even a novel like As I Lay Dying, which 1 admire enor-
mously, is not a novel at all, it’s a short story. To me a novel is
something that’s built around the character of time, the nature of
time, and the effects that time has on events and characters. When
I see a novel that’s supposed to take place in twenty-four hours, I
just wonder why the man padded out the short story.

Interviewer: Yeats said, "O’Connor is doing for Ireland what
Chekhov did for Russia.” What do you think of Chekhov?

O’Connor: Oh, naturally I admire Chekhov extravagantly, I
think every short-story writer does. He’s inimitable, a person to
read and admire and worship — ^but never, never, never to imitate.
He’s got all the most extraordinary technical devices, and the
moment you start imitating him without those technical devices,
you fall into a sort of rambling narrative, as I think even a good
story writer like Katherine Mansfield did. She sees that Chekhov
apparently constructs a su-ry without episodic interest, so she
decides that if she constructs a story without episodic interest it
will be equally good. It isn’t. What she forgets is that Chekhov
had a long career as a journalist, as a writer for comic magazines,
writing squibs, writing vaudevilles, and he had learned the art
very, very early of maintaining interest, of creating a bony struc-
ture. It’s only concealed in the later work. They think they can do
without that bony structure, but they’re all wrong.

Interviewer: What about your experiences in the Irish Repub-
lican Army?

O’Connor: My soldiering was rather like my efforts at being a
musician: it was an imitation of the behaviour of soldiers rathcr
than soldiering. I was completely incapable of remembering any-
thing for ten minutes. And I always got alarmed the moment
people started shooting at me, so I was a wretchedly bad soldier,
but that doesn’t prevent you from picking up the atmosphere of
the period. I really got into it when I was about fifteen as a sort of

WRITERS AT WORK

150

Boy Scout, doing odd jobs, for the I.R.A., and then continued on
with it until finally I was captured and intended for a year. Nearly
all the writers went with the extreme Republican group. People
like O’Faolain, myself, Francis Stuart, Peadar O’Donnell, all the
young writers of our generation went Republican. Why we did
it, the Lord knows, except that young writers are never capable of
getting the facts of anything correctly.

Int^viewer: And after that, you were with the Abbey?

O’Connor: Yes, for a few years. Yeats said, “I looked around me
and saw all the successful businesses were being run by ex-
gunmen, so I said, ’I must have gunmen,’ and now the theatre’s on
its feet again.” Again, Yeats was a romantic man who romanti-
cized me as a gunman, whereas in fact I was very much a student
— I always have been a student masquerading as a gunman. I’d
been a director for a number of years and then I was managing
director for a period — the only other managing director before
me had been Yeats. So I said to him, “What do I do as managing
director of this theatre?” And he said, “Well, that’s the question I
asked Lady Gregory when I was named managing director, and
she said, ‘Give very few orders, but see they’re obeyed.’ ” It must
have been about a year after I became a director of the board,
when we had at last got the thing organized properly, which it
hadn’t been for years, that the secretary submitted his report and
read out that the balance for the year was one and sixpence —
about thirty cents — and there was great applause. It was the first
time in years the theatre had paid its way.

Interviewer: What writers do you feel have influenced you in
your own work?

O’Connor: It’s very hard to say. The man who has influenced
me most, I suppose, is really Isaak Babel, and again with that
natural enthusiasm of mine for imitating everybody. “Guests of
the Nation” and a couple of the other stories in that book are
really imitations of Babel’s stories in The Red Cavalry [Konarmui].

Interviewer: What about working habits? How do you start a
story?

O’Connor: “Get black on white” used to be Maupassant’s
advice — that’s what I always do. I don’t give a hoot what the
writing’s like, I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the
main outlines of the story, then 1 can begin to .see it. When I write,
when I draft a story, I never think of writing nice sentences about.

FRANK o'cONNOR 151

"It was a nice August evening when Elizabeth Jane Moriarity was
coming down the rqad.” I just write roughly what happened, and
then I’m able to see what the construction looks like. It’s the
design of the story which to me is most important, the thing that
tells you thire’s a bad gap in the narrative here and you really
ought to fill that up in some way or another. I’m always looking at
the design of a story, not the treatment. Yesterday I was finishing
off a piece about my friend A. E. Coppard, the greatest of aU the
English storytellers, who died about a fortnight ago. I was describ-
ing the way Coppard must have written these stories, going
around with a notebook, recording what the lighting looked like,
what that house looked like, and all the time using metaphor to
suggest it to himself, "The road looked like a mad serpent going
up the hill,’’ or something of the kind, and, "She said so-and-so,
and the man in the pub said something else.’’ After he had written
them all out, he must have got the outline of his story, and
he’d start working in all the details. Now, I could never do that
at all. I’ve got to see what these people did, first of all, and then
I start thinking of whether it was a nice August evening or a
spring evening. I have to wait for the theme before I can do
anything.

Interviewer: Do you rewrite?

O’Connor: Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. And keep on re-
writing, and after it’s pubi hed, and then after it’s published in
book form, I usually rewrite it again. I’ve rewritten versions of
most of my early stories and one of these days, God help. I’ll pub-
lish these as well.

Interviewer: Do you keep notes as a source of supply for future
stories?

O’Connor: Just notes of themes. If somebody tells me a good
story. I’ll write it down in my four lines; that is the secret of the
theme. If you make the subject of a story twelve or fourteen lines,
that’s a treatment. You’ve already committed yourself to the sort of
character, the sort of surroundings, and the moment you’ve com-
mitted yourself, the story is already written. It has ceased to be
fluid, you can’t design it any longer, you can’t model it So I
always confine myself to my four lines. If it won’t go into four, that
means you haven’t reduced it to its ultimate simplicity, reduced
it to the fable. •

Interviewer: I have noticed in your stories a spareness of

WRITERS AT WORK

152

physical description of people and places. Why this apparent
rejection of sense impressions? p

O’Connor: I thoroughly agree, it’s one of the things I know I
do, and sometimes when I’m reading Coppard I feel that it’s en-
tirely wrong. I’d love to be able to describe people as*he describes
them, and landscapes as he describes them, but I begin the story
in the man’s head and it never gets out of the man’s head. And in
fact, in real life, when you meet somebody in the street you don’t
start recording that she had this sort of nose — at least a man
doesn’t. I mean, if you’re the sort of person that meets a girl in the
street and instantly notices the colour of her eyes and of her hair
and the sort of dress she’s wearing, then you’re not in the least like
me. I just notice a feeling from people. I notice particularly the
cadence of their voices, the sort of phrases they’ll use, and that’s
what I’m all the time trying to hear in my head, how people word
things — because everybody speaks an entirely different language,
that’s really what it amounts to. I have terribly sensitive hearing
and I’m terribly aware of voices. If I remember somebody, for
instance, that I was very fond of, I don’t remember what he or she
looked like, but I can absolutely take off the voice. I’m a good
mimic; I’ve a bit of the actor in me, I suppose, that’s really what it
amounts to. I cannot pass a story as finished unless I connect it
myself, unless I know how everybody in it spoke, which, as I say,
can go quite well with the fact that I couldn’t tell you in the least
what they looked like. If I use the right phrase and the reader
hears the phrase in his head, he sees the individual. It’s like
writing for the theatre, you see. A bad playwright will “pull” an
actor because he’ll tell him what to do, but a really good play-
wright will give you a part that you can do what you like with.
It’s transferring to the reader the responsibility for acting those
scenes. I’ve given him all the information I have and put it into
his own life.

Interviewer: What about adapting your own work to anothdr
medium — say, movies?

O’Connor: Well, I’ve tried it here and there and generally it’s
pretty awful. First of all. I’ve never been really allowed to follow
through with a movie as I’d like to do it. One of my sad experi-
ences with the movies is with the film I did for the Lifeboat
Society. I was told that my story mustn’t sink anything larger than
a tiny fishing-boat because that was all the money they had, so 1

FRANK o’cONNOR 153

wrote the story about the fishing-boat — ^two brothers who wouldn’t
have anything to db with each other, one commanding the life-
boat, the other, skipper of the fishing-boat. When the director
came down ±o the location, a magnificent American ship had gone
on the sands, and he decided to shift the story and bring in the
American ship, so he brought it in. The producer saw the film and
said, “But this isn’t the story you were told to film!” So, the pro-
ducer then canned the beautiful thing about the ship, all the
money was gone, and they couldn’t give me my little boat, and all
the thing you had was somebody telling the story. It wasn’t the
same. What I really enjoy doing is transferring stories to the air.
Again, my sort of story is suitable for that. The ones I’ve seen on
television, they don’t impress me. Again, they become too precise.
Also, of course, there is this awful business in television, even, cer-
tainly with the cinema, of the amount of money involved, so that
everything has to be tested again, and again, and again; this
thing’s got to be submitted to So-and-so, and So-and-so, and they
all lay down different law's and your script is being changed aU
the time. Finally, what comes over is nobody’s job — it’s a sort of
accident, and sometimes, by accident, you’ll get a fairly decent
movie or a fairly decent television show. But you never have that
feeling you have in the theatre, or in the story, above all (that’s
the reason I like writing short stories) that you’re your owm
theatre. You can control evv,»y bloomin’ thing — if you say it’s going
to be twilight, it’s going to be twilight and you’re not askin’ the
advice of a lighting man who will say to you, “Well, you can’t
have a second twilight, you had twilight ten minutes ago, you
can’t have another one.” You can do what you please and you’re
ultimately the only person responsible. To tell you the truth, I
don’t think any of these mass media is a satisfactory art form. The
real trouble is, the moment you get a mass audience, commercial
interests become involved. They say, "Oh, boy! There’s big money
in this! Now we’ve got to consider what the audiences like.” And
then they tell you, “Now you mustn’t offend the Catholics, you
mustn’t offend the Jews, you mustn’t offend the Salvation Army,
you mustn’t offend the mayors of cities.” ’They make a list of
taboos a mile long, and then they say, “Now, inside this, you can
say what you like” — and it’s maniac. The moment big money’s
involved and the pressures are put on, that is going to happen.
And they’re the most wonderful artists in the world. I mean, it’s

WRITERS AT WORK

154

all damn well to talk, but Hollywood has the finest brains in the
world out there. But they’re up against all tbsse vested interests,
and vested interests are (he very devil for the artist. In the Abbey,
die government voted to give us a hundred thousand dollars to
build a new theatre, and instantly the intrigues begflh: who was
going to be the manager of this theatre? “This is going to be a
really worth-while job; big money in this, boys.” And as long as it
was a question of who was going to lose money in accepting this
job, you got service. But that is true and that’s the really frighten-
ing thing about it. The people who want to exploit the forty
million are the danger. And they don’t want to exploit ’em too far
— bless ’em, they’re so nice, they’re so decent — ^"1 mean, between
ourselves, you don’t really want to hurt the feelin’s of this old Jew
down here” — and you don’t, you don’tl All you know perfectly
well is you’re not saving anything to hurt his feelings. But some-
body is interpreting for him, he’s not being allowed to give his
own views at all. You get the smart commercial boy who is going
to tell you, “Well, what they really like now is a little bit of
sadism. Couldn’t you introduce just a lit- tie sadistic scene here?”
And he’ll introduce it, all right. Again, the forty million, left to
their own decent devices, would probably reject the sadistic thing.
They’re being told, “Now this is what you like.” No, no, you can
only do works of art with an audience that you know, with all
commercial people left out of it. The great theatre is a theatre like
the Abbey, which was really run by a few people in their spare
time, and where the actors were working in their spare time. 'They
worked in their oflBces until five, had a sandwich, came along to
the theatre, and the most any of them ever got was six pounds a
week, about fifteen dollars, which was the highest salary ever paid
while I was there, even for the people on contract. And then you
get real works of art. But the moment Hollywood pops in on the
Abbey and says, “Oh, well, we can fix tho.se up, we can give him
twenty thousand dollars,” then they begin screaming against onS
another, they begin competing.

Interviewer: How do you feel about the academic approach
to the novel as compared to the natural approach?

O’Connor: To me, the novel is so human, the only thing I’m
interested in — I can’t imagine anything better in the world than
people. A novel is about people, it’s written for people, and the
moment it starts getting so intellectual that it gets beyond the

FRANK o'cONNOR 155

range of people and reduces them to academic formulae. I’m not
interested in it any longer. I really got into this row, big, at the
novel conference at Harvard, when I had a couple of people talk-
ing about the various types of novel — analysing them — and then
we had a hSvelist get up and speak about the responsibilities of
the novelist. I was with Anthony West on the stage and I was
gradually getting into hysterics. It’s never happened to me before
in public; I was giggling, I couldn’t stop myself. And, “All right,”
I said at the end of it, “if there are any of my students here I’d
like them to remember that writing is fun.” That’s the reason you
do it, because you enjoy it, and you read it because you enjoy it.
You don’t read it because of the serious moral responsibility to
read, and you don't write it because it’s a serious moral responsi-
bility. You do it for exactly the same reason that you paint pictures
or play with the kids. It’s a creative activity.

Take Faulkner; you mentioned him earlier. Faulkner tries to be
serious, tries to use all sorts of devices, technical devices, which
don’t come natural to him, which he really isn’t interested in, and
gives everybody the impression that he’s pompous. Well, he’s not
pompous, he’s naive — ^and humorous. And what a humorist!
There’s nobody else to touch him.

The man really is ingenuous. Joyce was not ingenuous. Joyce
was a university man. Paris Review's interview with Faulkner re-
minded me strongly of th- description that Robert Greene gives
of Shakespeare. All the university men of Shakespeare’s day
thought he was a simpleton, a bit of an idiot. He hadn’t been
educated, he just didn’t know how to write. And I can see Faulk-
ner approaching Joyce in exactly the way that Shakespeare
approached Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson had been to a university, Ben
Jonson knew Greek and Latin, and it never occurred to Faulkner
that he was greater than Joyce as it never oc-curred to Shakespeare
that he was greater than Ben Jonson. Look at the way he imitates
^en Jonson in Twelph Night — ^just a typical Jonson play— doing
the best he can to be like Jonson and all he succeeds in doing is
to be brittle. I'm really thinking of the time he came under Ben
Jonson’s influence — that would have been about the time Julius
Caesar was produced. Jonson has a crack somewhere or other
about Shakespeare’s being so uneducated that he didn’t even
know that Bohemia didn’t have a sea-coast, and he mentions how
he used to talk to the players about the horrible errors in Shake-

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156

speare s plays. He quotes from Julius Caesar — ^“Caesar doth never
Morong, but with just cause” — and he says, “Ijtold the players this
was an absurd line.” Shakespeare cut it out of Julius Caesar, it's no
longer there. As a natural writer, Faulkner is a fellow who’s got to
accept himself for what he is, and he’s got to reahze that the
plain people in Mississippi know a damn sight more about the
business of literature than the dons at Cambridge.

Interviewer: How important an ingredient do you consider
technique in writing?

O’Connor: I was cursed at birth with a passion for techniques,
but that’s a different thing entirely. I don’t think I’m ever fool
enough to imagine that a novel like Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by
Angus Wilson, is a good novel merely because it exploits every
know'n form of technique in the modern novel. It takes advantage
of the cinema; it goes off from Point Counter Point, which itself
is full of technical devices, and it’s all unnecessary. If you’ve got a
story to tell about people and tell it in the way in which it comes
chronologically, you’ve got the best thing you cun get in fiction.
But, you see, one of the troubles about the modern novel is this
idea that the novel has to be concentrated into twenty-four hours,
forty-eight hours, a w'eek, a month, and you must cut out every-
thing that goes before. The classical novel realized that you begin
with the conception of the hero and move on from there — ^you
demonstrate him through all his phases. That’s where the death of
the hero really appears in modern fiction, because the hero doesn’t
matter any longer, the circumstances are what matter — those
twenty-four hours. It used to be twenty-four hours in my youth,
but there hasn’t been a twenty-four-hour novel for at least twenty
years, as far as I can remember.

Interview'er: Can't you overc(*me the limits of a time frame
with such things as flashbacks and recollections?

O’CoN.NOR: That’s what the cinema has done to the novel. Here,
in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, you get a novel which would have beeit
a good novel if it had begun twenty years earlier. A certain crime,
a fraud, had been committed on archaeology, and if you traced
the people from the fraud on, you’d have had a good novel. What
happe.is? You get the crisis — the old gentleman who suspects a
fraud has been committed — what are his moral problems in the
last few weeks before he decides he’s going to reveal tire fraud?
And that’s the cinema. This thing, the twenty-four-hour novel.

FRANK o’cONNOR 157

began in the twenties — you get Ulysses, you get Virginia Woolf —
everybody was publishing twenty-four-hour novels at the time, and
the unities had at last been brought back into literature. As though
the unities mattered a damn, one way or the other, as though
what you wanted in the novel wasn’t the organic feeling of life,
the feeling, “This is the way it happens” — ^“If it happened at all,
it happened this way.”

Interviewer: Can’t you use the unities as a convenient frame-
work in which to carry your story, to provide structure?

O’Connor: No, I disagree all along the line. Not in a novel. In
flashbacks you describe minor points: at this point, he did this
rather than the other thing. You never frequent this mart — there’s
that very good French verb, frequenter, which is the essence of a
novel. You’ve got to be inside that man’s head, and you’re never
inside this man’s head if at any moment he’s got to observe the
unities. That’s all right in the theatre, which is a craft as much as
an art.

Interviewer: Of course you have the time and space limitations
of the theatre.

O’Connor: And your audience, which is the biggest limitation
of all — the number of things you can do to that audience. It’s no
use referring that audience to something they’ve never heard of —
you take an audience of Louis XIV’s time and you refer to some
mythological figure, they ki.ew perfectly well what you were talk-
ing about, but no use doing that nowadays — nobody’d know what
you were talking about.

This construct novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, falsifies the novel
from the word go. Having been a librarian, I understand it per-
fectly, because your job when you’re making a catalogue is to
provide all the cross-references you’re ever likely to need. So this
is a book about Irish archaeology, but it’s got an awful lot about
modern American history, and consequently you give a cross-
reference to American history and if you’re a really good cata-
loguer, that thing is a set of cross-references so that anybody who
wants to find out about modern American history can find it out
in Irish archaeology. False surprise, I think, is the real basis of it.

Interviewer: As Edmund Wilson said, “Who cares who killed
Roger Ackroyd?”

O’Connor: I care, passionately. That’s a different thing entirely.
I’m fascinated by detective stories. There you get a real form—

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158

you don’t get this fake form imposed. At least it’s a passionate
logical structure. Somebody kiUed this guy. Who killed him? And
if you have a real writer on the job, you can get wonderful effects.

Intet viewer: But they haven’t much in the way of characteriza •
tion, have they?

O’Connor: Gosh, some of the good ones have. And very good
characterization! too. Even Erie Stanley Gardner. Perry Mason,
when he began, was a real character — ^he’s become a prototype
now — he was a real person and you could feel him striding into a
room. I could see that man.

Interviewer: Did you know James Joyce?

O’Connor: As well as one can know a man one has met a couple
of times and corresponded with. He was shy in a different way
from Faulkner — he was arrogant in a way that Faulkner is not
arrogant.

Interviewer: Joyce’s looks were sort of against him, don’t you
think?

O’Connor: An extraordinarily handsome man! He gave the
impression of being a great surgeon, but not a writer at all. And he
was a surgeon, he was not a writer. He used to wear white sur-
geon’s coats all the time and that increased the impression, and he
had this queer, axe-like face with this enormous jaw, the biggest
jaw I have ever seen on a human being. I once did a talk on Joyce
in which I mentioned that he had the biggest chin I had ever seen
on a human being, and T. S. Eliot wrote a letter saying that he
had often seen chins as big as that on other Irishmen. Well, I
didn’t know how to reply to that.

So now to get on back to what we were saying about the uni-
versity novelists versus the natural novelists. 'The university
novelists have been having it their own way for thirty years, and
it’s about time a natural novelist got back to the job and really
told stories about people. Pritchett argued (I wrote this book on
the novel — I don’t know whether you’ve seen it — The Mirror In
the Roadway) that this conception of character has disappeared
entirely, the conception of character that I am talking about. You
see, I don’t believe there’s anything else in the world except
human beings, they’re the best thing you’re ever likely to discover,
and he says, “Well, this is all finished with.” And I know what
Pritchett means — the Communists and so on have got rid of it
all. there aren’t individuals any longer. You get old Cardinal

FRANK o'cONNOR 159

Mindszenty in and you give him the treatment, so he comes out
and says what you«want him to say. There are no individuals.
What I can’t understand is why, in America, the last middle-class
country, you stiU cannot beat this loss of faith in the individual.

I’ve had tlTls argument out I was reviewing for a London news-
paper, and a British intelligence officer who was also a novelist
wrote a book in which he defended the use of torture against
prisoners. My paper was Conservative, and I asked, “How far can
I go?’’ and they said, “You can go the limit.’’ We asked their
lawyers in and they said, “Say what you want to say’’ — ^and I did.
They were magnificent about it. But that book was reviewed in
the Left-Wing journals and they saw nothing wrong with this
defence of torture. I know perfectly well you can make a human
being say anything or do anything if you torture him enough, and
that does not prove that the individual doesn’t exist.

Interviewer: Doesn’t the unseen and unrevealed, the sub-
conscious, have a bearing on the truth about an individual?

O’Connor: We were talking about the twenty-four-hour novel
and I say, to me, that’s all represented by Joyce, talking about
epiphanies, that, in fact, you can never know a character. At some
moment he’s going to reveal himself unconsciously, and you watch
and then you walk out of the room and you write it down, “So-
and-so at this point revealed what his real character was.” I still
maintain that living with somebody, knowing somebody, you
know him as well as he c'’n be known — ^that is to say, you know
ninety per cent of him. Wnat happens if you’re torturing him or
he’s dying of cancer is no business of mine and that is not the
individual. What a man says when he’s dying and in great pain is
not evidence. All right, lie’ll be converted to anything that’s handy,
but the substance of the character remains with me, that’s what
matters, the real thing.

Interviewer: As I recall at Harvard, some of the students
thought that ignoring the psychological was old-fashioned.

O’Connor: And I am old-fashioned! It’s the only old-fashioned-
ness you can come back to. You’ve got to come back eventually to
humanism, and that’s humanism in the old sense of the word, whRt
the Latins and Creeks thought about human beings, not the
American sense of the word, that everybody is conditioned. Tbe
Greek and Latin thing says, “No, this is a complete individual.”
That’s the feeling you get from Plutarch, that people are as you

WBITEBS AT WOBK

IGO

see them, and no psychiatrist is going to tell you an3^hing funda-
mentally different If he does, he’s an ass, that’s all. People are as
they behave. You’re working with a man for years. He’s kind in
the great majority of the things he does. You say, “He’s kind.” The
psychiatrist says, “No, no, no, he’s really cruel,” and you’re faced
with this problem of which you are going to accept — ^the evidence
of your own senses, of your own mind, of your own feeling of
history, or this thing which says to you, “You don’t understand
how a human being works”?

Intebview'eb: What about the problem of the struggling writer
who must make a living?

O’Connor: Now, tliat’s something I can’t understand about
America. It’s a big, generous country, but so many students of
mine seemed to think they couldn’t let anyone else support them. A
student of mine had this thing about you mustn’t live on your
father and I argued with him. I explained that a European writer
would live on anybody, would live on a prostitute if he had to, it
didn’t matter; the great thing was to get the job done. But he
didn’t believe in this, so he rang up his father and told him he’d
had a story refused by The New Yorker, and his father said, “I
can keep you for the next forty years, don’t you think you can get
a story in The New Yorker in forty years?” Well, this fellow came
along and told me this tragic tale. Now, I felt the father was a
man I understood and sympathized with, a decent man. But the
boy felt he mustn’t be supported by his father, so he came down
to New York and started selling office furniture.

Interviewer: Why don’t you teach?

O’Connor: I can’t make a living out of it. You can only just get
by on the sort of salaries that universities pay. I didn’t write a line
while I was at Harvard. You’ve nothing left over to write — I’d just
get involved with the students all the way. I was far more pleased
with a student’s successes than I would have been with my own.
and that’s wrong. You’ve got to leave a bit of jealousy in yourself.

Interviewer: Do you think of a novel as a lot of short stories or
one big short story?

O’Connor: It ought to be one big short story, and not one big
short story, but one big novel. That’s the real trouble — the novel is
not a short story — there’s your twenty-four-hour novel, that’s
what’s wrong with it, it’s a short story, and that’s what’s wrong
with Hemingway, wrong with most of them; the span is too

FRANK o'cONNOR 161

small. The span of a novel ought to be big. There is this busi-
ness of the long shert story turned out as a novel, and I’m all
the time getting them. The span is too brief; there is nothing to
test these characters by. Take Ulysses, which is twenty-four hours,
and I maintain it’s a long short story. And it was written as a short
story, don’t forget that. It was originally entitled "Mr. Hunter’s
Day.” And it’s still “Mr. Hunter’s Day” and it still is thirty pages.
It’s all development sideways. That’s really what I was talking
about: the difference between the novel which is a development, an
extension into time, and this novel, which is not a novel, which is
an extension sideways. It doesn’t lead forward, it doesn’t lead your
mind forward. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is the same: “So now, boys,
having finished with this brief moment of our novel, we’ll go
backwards for a while.” And all the time they’re just going out like
that because they’re afraid to go forwards.

Interviewer: O’Faolain talks about that: Hemingway trying to
isolate his hero in time — trying to isolate him to one moment,
when he is put to the test.

O’Connor: O’Faolain made a good point about Hemingway
there. He’s saying, "Nothing happened to him before the stoiy
begins; nothing happens to him afterwards.” And I think that’s
true of most short stories. He’s talking about a special aspect of
Hemingway — ^that Hemingway will not allow the character to
have had any past. You admit he’s had a past, but you say that
the whole past is illumine ♦^ed by the particular event which you
are now telling, also the whole future; you can predict a man’s
development from this. I admit that from the point of view of
the short story, you ought to be able to say, “Nothing that hap-
pened before this short story is of real importance, nothing that
happens after it is likely to be of great importance.” But you don’t
try to cut it off, which is what Hemingway does. You just say,
“This is so unimportant that I’m not going to mention it at all.”

•Interviewer: What do you think about legional influences in
American literature?

O’Connor: I attribute all good literature in America to New
England — including Katherine Anne Porter.

Interviewer: What about Willa Cather?

O’Connor: There you get this tremendous nostalgia for plains,
the longing for New England, and the longing for a sense of be-
longing somewhere, so then she runs away to Halifax to try to

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162

get it, and when that doesn’t do she goes right down to New
Mexico in order to get the Catholic tradition. But she’s really a
New Englander who never settled down. She’s a DP writer — and
a great writer.

Interviewer: What is the greatest essential of a stoty?

O’Connor: You have to have a theme, a story to tell. Here’s a
man at the other side of the table and I’m talking to him; I’m
going to tell him something that will interest him. As you know
perfectly well, our principal difficulty at Harvard was a number
of people who’d had affairs with girls or had had another interest-
ing experience, and wanted to come in and tell about it, straight
away. That is not a theme. A theme is something that is worth
something to everybody. In fact, you wouldn’t, if you’d ever been
involved in a thing like this, grab a man in a pub and say, “Look,
I had a girl out last night, under the Charles Bridge.” That's the
last thing you’d do. You grab somebody and say, “Look, an extra-
ordinary thing happened to me yesterday — I met a man — he said
this to me — ” and that, to me, is a theme. The moment you grab
somebody by the lapels and you’ve got something to tell, that’s a
real story. It means you want to tell him and think the story is
interesting in itself. If you start describing your own personal
experiences, something that’s only of interest to yourself, then
you can’t express yourself, you cannot say, ultimately, what you
think about human beings. The moment you say this, you’re com-
mitted.

I’ll tell you what I mean. We were down on the south coast
of Ireland for a holiday and we got talkin’ to this old farmer and
he said his son, who was dead now, had gone to America, He’d
married an American girl and she had come over for a visit, alone.
Apparently her doctor had told her a trip to Ireland would do her
good. And she stayed with the parents, had gone around to see
his friends and cither relations, and it wasn’t till after she’d gone
that they learned that the hoy had died. Why didn’t she tell therfi?
There’s your story. Dragging the reader in, making the reader a
part of the story — the reader is a part of the story. You’re saying
all the time, “This story is about you — de te fabula . . .”

Interviewer: Do you think the writer should be a reformer or
an observer?

O’Connor: I think the writer’s a reformer; the observer thing
is very old, it goes back to Flaubert. I can’t write about something

FRANK o'cONNOR 163

I don’t admire — ^it goes back to the old concept of the celebration:
you celebrate the heto, an idea.

Interviewer: Why do you use a pseudonym?

O’Connor: The real reason was that 1 was a public official, a
librarian ift tHork. There was a big row at the time about another
writer who had published what was supposed to be a blasphe-
mous story, and I changed my name, my second name being
Francis and my mother’s name being O’Connor, so that I could
ofiBcially say that I didn’t know who Frank O’Connor was. It satis-
fied my committee, it satisfied me. The curious thing now is that
I’m better known as Frank O’Connor than I’ll ever be as Michael
O’Donovan. I’d never have interfered with my name except that
it was just convenient, and I remember when I did it I intended
to change back, but by that time it had become a literary property
and I couldn’t have changed back without too much trouble.

Interviewer: Have you any particular words of encourage-
ment for young writers?

O’Connor: Well, there’s this: Don’t take rejection slips too
seriously. I don’t think they ought to send them out at all. I think
a very amusing anthology might be gotten up of rejection letters
alone. It’s largely a question of remembering, when you send
something out, that So-and-so is on the other end of this one, and
he has certain interests. To give an example of what I mean on
this rejection business, I had a story accepted by a magazine. So
I wrote it over again as I Iways do, and sent it back. Well, some-
one else got it and I got this very nice letter saying that they
couldn’t use it, but that they’d be very interested in seeing any-
thing else I wrote in the future.

Anthony Whittier

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905. He
attended Vanderbilt University, where his early work was pub-
lished in the literary magazine Fugitive. He was associated with
the group of Vanderbilt poets and critics known, after the maga-
zine, as the Fugitives, including among others Allen Tate, John
Crowe Ransom, Merrill Moore, and Donald Davidson.

After his graduation from Vanderbilt in Warren won
fellowships to the University of California and Yale. In he
was at Oxford on a Rhode Scholarship. He has taught extensively
since then — at Vanderbilt, Southwestern College, Louisiana State,
Minnesota, and Yale. ' at Louisiana State, he founded the

Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks.

Warren’s non-fiction works include a biography of John Brown
, an article stating his sociological views, which appeared in
a collection by twelve Southern writers called I’ll Take My Stand,
and in a redefinition of his sociological opinions in a little
book entitled Segregation. His novels are; Night Rider ,
awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship; At Heavens
Gate ‘ ; All the King’s men , for which he won a Pulitzer

Prize; World Enough and Time Band of Angels

and Blackberry Winter, a novelette he wrote in ' ‘ A collection
of short stories entitled Circus in the Attic was published in

Collections of his poetry have appeared under the titles Thirty-
Six Poems , Eleven Poems on the Same Theme ', Selec-
ted Poems , and Promises: Poems

Robert Penn Warren

This interview takes place in the apartment of Ralph Ellison at
the American Academy in Rome: a comfortable room filled with
books and pictures. Mr. Warren, who might be described as a
sandy man with a twinkle in his eye, is ensconced in an armchair
while the Interviewfrs, manning tape recorder and notebook, are
perched on straight-back chairs. Mrs. Ellison, ice-bowl tinkling,
comes into the room occasionally to replenish the glasses: all drink
pastis.

Interviewers: First, if you’re agreeable, Mr. Warren, a few
biographical details just to get you “placed.” I believe you were
a Rhodes Scholar

Warren: Yes, from Kentucky.

Interviewers: University of Kentucky?

Warren: No, I attend* ^ Vanderbilt. But I was Rhodes Scholar
from Kentucky.

Interviewers: Were you writing then?

Warren: As I am now, trying to.

Interviewers: Did you start writing in college?

Warren: I had no interest in writing when I went to college.
I was interested in reading — oh, poetry and standard novels, you
know. My ambitions were purely scientific, but I got cured of that
Cast by bad instruction in Freshman Chemistry and good instruc-
tion in Freshman English.

Interviewers: What were the works that were especially mean-
ingful for you? What books were — ^well, doors opening?

Warren: Well, several things come right away to mind. First
of all, when I was six years old, “Horatius at the Bridge” I thought
was pretty grand— when they read it to me, to be more exact.

Interviewers: And others?

167

WRITERS AT WORK

168

Warren: Yes, "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent
to Aix,” at about age nine; I thought it w's pretty nearly the
height of human achievement. I didn’t know whether I was im-
pressed by riding a horse that fast or writing the poem. I couldn’t
distinguish between the two, but I knew there was something
pretty fine going on . . . Then “Lycidas.”

Interviewers: At what age were you then?

Warren: Oh, thirteen, something like that. By that time I knew
it wasn’t what was happening in the poem that was important —
it was the poem. I had crossed the line.

Interviewers: What about prose works?

Warren: Then I discovered Buckle’s History of Civilization.
Did you ever read Buckle?

Interviewers: Of course, and Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Re-
public. Most Southern bookshelves contain that.

Warren: And Prescott . . . and The Oregon Trail is always
hovering around there somewhere. Thing that interested me
about Buckle was that he had the one big answer to everything:
geography. History is all explained by geography. I read Buckle
and then I could explain everything. It gave me quite a hold over
the other kids; they hadn’t read Buckle. I had the answer to every-
thing. Buckle was my Marx. That is, he gave you one answer to
everything, and the same dead-sure certainty. After I had had my
session with Buckle and the one-answer system at the age of thir-
teen, or whatever it was, I was somewhat inoculated against Marx
and his one-answer system when he and the depression hit me
and my work when I was about twenty-five. I am not being frivo-
lous about Marx. But when I began to hear some of my friends
talk about him in 1930, 1 thought, "Here we go again, boys.’’ I had
previously got hold of one key to the universe: Buckle. And some-
where along the way I had lost the notion that there was ever
going to be just one key.

But getting back to that shelf of books, the Motley and Prescott
and Parkman, et cetera, isn’t it funny how unreadable most history
written now is when you compare it with those writers?

Interviewers: Well, there’s Samuel Eliot Morison.

Warren: Yes, a very fine writer. Another is Vann Woodward, he
writes very well indeed. And Bruce Catton. But Catton maybe
doesn’t count, he’s not a professional historian. If he wants to write
a book on history that happens to be good history and good

ROBERT PENN WARREN 169

writing at the same time, there isn’t any graduate school to try to
stop him.

Interviewers: It’s very interesting that you were influenced by
historical wjiting so early in life. It has always caught one’s eye
how histoi5^ is used in your work, for instance Night Rider.

Warren: Well, that isn’t a historical novel. The events belonged
to my early childhood. I remember the troops 'coming in when
martial law was declared in that part of Kentucky. When I wrote
the novel I wasn’t thinking of it as history. For one thing, the
world it treated still, in a way, survived. You could still talk to
the old men who had been involved. In the 1900s I remember
going to see a judge down in Kentucky — ^he was an elderly man
then, a man of the highest integrity and reputation — who had
lived through that period and who by common repute had been
mixed up in it — his father had been a tobacco grower. He got to
talking about that period in Kentucky. He said, “Well, I won’t say
who was and who wasn’t mixed up in some of those things, but I
will make one observation: I have noticed that the sons of those
who were opposed to getting a fair price for tobacco ended up as
either bootleggers or brokers.” But he was an old-fashioned kind
of guy, for whom bootlegging and brokerage looked very much
alike. Such a man didn’t look “historical” thirty years ago. Now
he looks like the thigh bone of a mastodon.

Interviewers: It seems clear that you don’t write “historical”
novels; they are always c .icemed with urgent problems, but the
awareness of history seems to be central.

Warren: That’s so. I don’t think I do write historical novels. I
try to find stories that catch my eye, stories that seem to have
issues in purer form than they come to one ordinarily.

Interview'Ers: A kind of unblurred topicality?

Warren: I wrote two unpublished novels in the thirties. Night
Rider is the world of my childhood. At Heavens Gate was con-
Femporary. My third published. All the King’s Men, was worlds I
had seen. All the stories were contemporary. The novel I’m
writing now, and two I plan, arc all contemporary.

Inteha'tewers: Brother to Dragons was set in the past.

Warren: It beloiiged to a historical setting, but it was not a
departure: it was a matter of dealing with issues in a more
mythical form. I hate costume novels, but maybe I’ve written
some and don’t know it. I have a romantic kind of interest in the

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objects of American history: saddles, shoes, figures of speech, rifles,
et cetera. They’re worth a lot. Help you focu^'. There is a kind of
extraordinary romance about American history. That's the only
word for it — a kind of self-sufficiency. You know, tfie grandpas
and the great-grandpas carried the assumption that somehow their
lives and their decisions were important; that as they went up,
down, here and there, such a life was important and that it was a
man’s responsibility to live it.

Interviewers: In this connection, do you feel that there are
certain themes which are basic to the American experience, even
though a body of writing in a given period might ignore or evade
them?

Warren: First thing, without being systematic, what comes to
mind without running off a week and praying about it, would be
that America was based on a big promise — a great big one: the
Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in
the house, that’s quite a problem — particularly when you’ve got
to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the
things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is
stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was
just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America
— you see, that saddle’s going to jump now and then and it pricks.
There’s another thing in the American experience that makes for
a curious kind of abstraction. We suddenly had to define ourselves
and what we stood for in one night. No other nation ever had to
do that. In fact, one man did it — one man in an upstairs room,
'Thomas Jefferson. Sure, you might say that he was the amanuensis
for a million or so people stranded on the edge of the continent
and backed by a wilderness, and there’s some sense in that notion.
But somebody had to formulate it — in fact, just overnight, what-
ever the complicated background of that formulation — and we’ve
been stuck with it ever since. With the very words it used. Do you
know the Polish writer Adam Gurowski?* He was of a highly
placed Polish family; he came and worked as a civil servant in
Washington, a clerk, a kind of self-appointed spy on democracy.
His book America — of 18.57, I think — begins by saying that
America is unique among nations because other nations are acci-
dents of geography or race, but America is based on an idea.

’Adam Curowski, 1805-1866, author of America and Europe (1857) and
My Diary: Notes on the Civil War (1866) among other works.

ROBERT PENI^ WARREN 171

Behind the comedy of proclaiming that idea from Fourth of July
platforms there is* the solemn notion. Believe and ye shaU be
saved. That abstraction sometimes does become concrete, is a
part of the American experience — and of the American problem
— the la^between idea and fact, between word and flesh.

Interviewers: What about historical time? America has had
so much happening in such a short time.

Warren; Awful lot of foreshortening in it. America lives in two
times, chronological time and history. The last widow drawing a
pension from the War of 1812 died just a few years ago. My father
was old enough to vote when the last full-scale battle against
Indians was fought — a couple of regiments, I think, of regulars
with artillery.

Interviewers: From the first your work is explicitly concerned
with moral judgments, even during a period of history when much
American fiction was concerned with moral questions only in the
narrow way of the “proletarian” and “social realism” novels of the
1930s.

Warren; I think I ought to say that behind Night Rider and
my next novel. At Heavens Gate, there was a good deal of the
shadow not only of the events of that period but of the fiction of
that period. I am more aware of that fact now than I was then.
Of course only an idiot could have not been aware that he
was trying to write a novel about, in one sense, “social justice” in
Night Rider or, for that ^natter. At Heavens Gate. But in some
kind of a fumbling way I was aware, I guess, of trying to find the
dramatic rub of th'* story at some point a little different from and
deeper than the poii'.t of dramatic rub in some of the then current
novels. But what I want to emphasize is the fact that I was
fumbling rather than working according to plan and convictions
already arrived at. When you start any book you don’t know what,
ultimately, your issues are. You try to write to find them. You’re
%ddling with the stuff, hoping to make sense, whatever kind of
sense you can make.

Interviewers: At least you could say that as a Southerner you
were more conscious of what some of the issues were. You couldn’t,
I assume, forget the complexity of American social reality, no
matter what your aesthetic concerns, or other concerns.

Warren: It never crossed my mind when I began writing fiction
that I could write about anything except life in the South. It never

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crossed my mind that I knew about anything else; knew, that is,
well enough to write about. Nothing else ever* nagged you enough
to stir the imagination. But I stumbled into fiction rather late. I’ve
got to be autobiographical about this. For years I. didn’t have
much interest in fiction, that is, in college. I was reading my head
off in poetry, Elizabethan and the moderns, Yeats, Hardy, Eliot,
Hart Crane. I wasn’t seeing the world around me — that is, in any
way that might be thought of as directly related to fiction. Be it to
my everlasting shame that when the Scopes trial was going on a
few miles from me I didn’t even bother to go. My head was too
full of John Ford and John VVebster and William Blake and T. S.
Eliot. If I had been thinking about writing novels about the South
I would have been camping in Dayton, Tennessee — and would
have gone about it like journalism. At least the Elizabethans saved
me from that. As for starting fiction, I simply stumbled on it. In
tho spring of 1900 I was at Oxford, doing graduate work. I guess
I was homesick and not knowing it. Paul Rosenfeld, who, with
Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, was then editing the old
American Caravan, wrote and asked me why I didn’t try a long
story for them. He had had the patience one evening to listen to
me blowing off about night-rider stories from boyhood. So Oxford
and homesickness, or at least back-homewardlooking, and Paul
Rosenfeld made me write Prime Leaf, a novelette which appeared
in the Caravan, and was later the germ of Night Rider. I remem-
ber playing hooky from academic work to write the thing, and the
discovery that you could really enjoy trying to write fiction. It was
a new way of looking at things, and my head was full of recollec-
tions of the way objects looked in Kentucky at»d Tennessee. It was
like going back to the age of twelve, going fishing and all that. It
was a sense of freedom and excitement.

Intervieweb.s: When you started writing, what preoccupations,
technically and thematically, had you in common with your
crowd?

Wabben; I suppose you mean the poets called the Fugitive
Croup in Nashville — Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald
Davidson, Merrill Moore, et cetera?

Interviewebs: Yes.

Wabben: Well, in one sense, I don’t know what the group had
in common. I think there is a great fallacy in assuming that there
was a systematic programme behind the Fugitive Croup. There

ROBERT PENN WARREN 173

was no such thing, and among the members there were deep dif-
ferences in temperament and aesthetic theory. They were held
together by geography and poetry. They all lived in Nashville,
and they were all interested in poetry. Some were professors,
some busitiSssmen, one was a banker, several were students. They
met informally to argue philosophy and read each other the poems
they wrote. For some of them these interests were incidental to
their main concerns. For a couple of others, like Tate, it was
poetry or death. Their activity wasn’t any “school” or "pro-
gramme.” Mutual respect and common interests, that was what
held them together — that and the provincial isolation, I guess.

Interviewers; But did you share with them any technical or
thematic preoccupations?

Warren; The answer can’t, you see, apply to the group. But in
a very important way, that group was my education. I knew indi-
vidual writers, poems, and books through them. I was exposed to
the liveliness and range of the talk and the wrangle of argument.
I heard the talk about techniques, but techniques regarded as
means of expression. But most of all I got the feeling that poetry
was a vital activity, that it related to ideas and to life. I came into
the group rather late. I was timid and reverential, I guess. And I
damned well should have been. Anyway, there was little or no talk
in those days about fiction. Some of the same people, a little later,
however, did give me in a very concrete way a sense of how litera-
ture can be related to pla j and history.

Interviewers; It’s very striking when you consider writing by
Southerners before the twenties. Some think that few writers were
then in the South as talented or competent, or as confident, as
today. This strikes me as a very American cultural phenomenon in
spite of its specifically regional aspects. Would you say that this
was a kind of repetition of what occurred in New England, say,
during the 1830s?

Warren; Yes, I do see some parallel between New England
before the Civil War and the South after World War I to the
present. The old notion of a shock, a cultural shock, to a more or
less closed and static society — ^you know, what happened on a
bigger scale in the Italian Renaissance or Elizabethan England.
After 1918 the modein industrial world, with its good and bad, hit
the South; all sorts of ferments began. As for individual writers,
almost all of them of that period had had some important expert-

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174

ence outside the South, then returned there — ^some strange mix-
ture of continuity and discontinuity in their experience — a jagged
quality. But more than mere general cultural or personal shocks,
there was a moral shock in the South, a tension that grew out of
the race situation. That moral tension had always been there, but
it took new and more exacerbated forms after 1900. For one thing,
the growing self-consciousness of the Negroes opened up possi-
bilities for expanding economic and cultural horizons. A conse-
quence was that the Southerner’s loyalties and pieties — ^real
values, mind you — were sometimes staked against his religious
and moral sense, equally real values. There isn’t much vital ima-
gination, it seems to me, that doesn’t come from this sort of shock,
imbalance, need to “relive,” redefine life.

Interview'Ers: There is, for us, an exciting spiral of redefinition
in your own work from I'll Take My Stand through the novels to
Segregation. It would seem that these works mark stages in a
combat with the past. In the first, the point of view seems ortho-
dox and unreconstructed. How can one say it? In recent years
your work has become more intense and has taken on an element
of personal confession which is so definite that one tends to look,
for examplfe, on Segregation and Brother to Dragons as two facets
of a single attitude.

Warren: You’ve thrown several different things at me here. Let
me try to sort them out. First you refer to the Southern Agrarian
book III Take My Stand, of 1903, and then to my recent little book
on Segregation. My essay in Til Take My Stand was about the
Negro in the South, and it was a defence of segregation. I haven’t
read that piece, as far as I can remember, since 1900, and I’m not
sure exactly how things are put there. But I do recall very dis-
tinctly the circumstances of writing it. I wrote it at Oxford at
about the same time I began writing fiction. The two things were
tied together — the look back home from a long distance. I remem-
ber the jangle and wrangle of writing the essay and some kind of
discomfort in it, some sense of evasion, I guess, in writing it, in
contrast with the free feeling of writing the novelette Prime Leaf,
the sense of seeing something fresh, the holiday sense plus some
stirring up of something inside yourself. In the essay, I reckon, I
was trying to prove something, and in the novelette trying to find
out something, see something, feel something— exist. Don’t mis-
understand me. On the objective side of things, there wasn’t a

ROBERT PENN WARREN 175

power under heaven that could have changed segregation in 1929
—the South wasn’ttfready for it, the North wasn’t ready for it, the
Negro wasn’t. The Coiut, if I remember correctly, had just re-
aflBmed segregation, too. No, I’m not talking about the objective
fact, but aBout the subjective fact, yours truly, in relation to the
objective fact. Well, it wasn’t being outside the South that made
me change my mind. It was coming back home. In a litde while
I realized I simply couldn’t have written that essay again. I guess
tr3ang to write fiction made me realize that. If you are seriously
trying to write fiction you can’t allow yourself as much evasion as
in trying to write essays. But some people can’t read fiction. One
reviewer — a professional critic — said that Band of Angels is an
apology for the plantation system. Well, the story of Band wasn’t
an apology or an attack. It was simply trying to say something
about something. But, Cod Almighty, you have to spell it out for
some people, especially a certain breed of professional defender-
of-the-good, who makes a career of holding the right thoughts and
admiring his own moral navel. Well, that’s getting off the point
What else was it you threw at me?

Interviewers: Would you say that each book marks a redefini-
tion of reality arrived at through a combat with the past? A
development from the traditional to the highly personal reality?
A confession?

Warren: I never thought of a combat with the past. 1 guess 1
think more of trying to . :d what there is valuable to us, the line
of continuity to us, and through us. The specific Southern past.
I’m now talking about. As for combat, I guess the real combat is
always with yourself. Southerner or anybody else. You fight your
battles one by one and do the best you can. Whatever patterns
there are develop, aien’t planned — ^the really basic patterns, I
mean, the kind you live into. As for confession, that wouldn’t have
occurred to me, but 1 do know that in the last ten years or a little
►more the personal relation to my writing changed. I never
bothered to define the change. I quit writing poems for several
years; that is. I’d start them, get a lot down, then feel that I wasn’t
connecting somehow. I didn’t finish one for several years, they
felt false. Then I got back at it, and that is the bulk of what I’ve
done since Band of Angels — a new book of poems which will be
out in the summer. When you try to write a book— even objective
fiction — ^you have to write from the inside not the outside — ^the

WBITERS AT WORK

176

inside of yourself. You have to find what’s there. You can't predict
it — ^just dredge for it and hope you have scoiething worth the
dredging. That isn’t “confession” — that’s just trying to use what-
ever the Lord lets you lay hand to. And of course you have to have
common sense enough and structural sense enough to know what
is relevant. You don’t choose a story, it chooses you. You get to-
gether with that story somehow: you’re stuck with it. There cer-
tainly is some reason it attracted you, and you’re writing it trying
to find out that reason; justify, get at that reason. I can always
look back and remember the exact moment when I encountered
the germ of any story I wrote — a clear flash.

INTERVIEWEB.S: What is your period of incubation? Months?
Years?

Warren; Something I read or see stays in my head for five or
six years. I always remember the date, the place, the room, the
road, when I first was struck. For instance. World Enough and
Time. Katherine Anne Porter and I were both at the Library of
Congress as Fellows. We were in the same pew, had offices next
to each other. She came in one day with an old pamphlet, the
trial of Beauchamp for killing Colonel Sharp. She said, “Well,
Red, you better read this.” There it was. I read it in five minutes.
But I was six years making the book. Any book I write starts with
a flash but takes a long time to shape up. All of your first versions
are in your head, so by the time you sit down to write you have
some line developed in your head.

Interviewers: What is the relation of sociological research and
other types of research to the forms of fiction?

Warren: I think it’s purely accidental. For one writer a big
dose of such stuff might be fine, for another it might be poison.
I’ve known a good many people, some of them writers, who think
of literature as material that you “work up.” You don’t “work up”
literature. They point at Zola. But Zola didn’t do that, nor did
Dreiser. They may have thought they did, but they didn’t. They
weren’t “working up” something — in one sense, something was
working them up. You see the world as best you can — with or
without the help of somebody's research, as the case may be. You
see as much as you can, and the events and books that are interest-
ing to you should be interesting to you because you’re a human
being, not because you’re trying to be a writer. Then those things
may be of some use to you as a writer later on. I don’t believe in

ROBERT PENN WARREN

177

a schematic approach to material. The business of researching for
a book strikes me asta sort of obscenity. What I mean is, research-
ing for a book in the sense of trying to find a book to write. Once
you are engaged by a subject, are in your book, have your idea,
you may ot fliay not want to do some investigating. But you ought
to do it in the same spirit in which you’d take a walk in the even-
ing air to think things over. You can’t research td get a book. You
stumble on it, or hope to. Maybe you will, if you live right.

Interviewers: Speaking of craft, how conscious are you of the
dramatic structure of your novels when you begin? I ask because
in your work there is quite a variety of sub-forms, folklore, set
pieces like “The Ballad of Billy Potts” or the Cass Mastem episode
in All the Kings Men. Are these planned as part of the dramatic
structure, or do they arise while you are being carried by the flow
of invention?

Warren: I try to think a lot about the craft of other people —
that’s a result of my long years of teaching. You’ve been explaining
things like how the first scene of Hamlet gets off, thinking of how .
things have been done ... I suppose some of this sinks down to
your gizzard. When it comes to your own work you have made
some objective decisions, such as which character is going to tell
the story. That’s a prime question, a question of control. You have
to make a judgment. You find one character is more insistent, he’s
more sensitive and more pointed than the others. But as for other
aspects of structure and craft, I guess, in the actual process of
composition or in preliminary thinking, I try to immerse myself in
the motive and feel towards meanings, rather than plan a struc-
ture or plan effects. At some point, you know, you have to try to
get one with Cod and then take a hard cold look at what you’re
doing and work on it once more, trusting in your viscera and ner-
vous system and your previous efforts as far as they’ve gone. The
hard thing, the objective thing, has to be done before the book is
written. And if anybody dreams up “Kubla Khan,” it’s going to be
Coleridge. If the work is done the dream will come to the man
who’s ready for that particular dream; it’s not going to come just
from dreaming in general. After a thing is done, then I try to get
tough and critical with myself. But, damn it, it may sometimes be
too late. But that is the fate of man. What 1 am trying to say is
that I try to forget the abstractions when I’m actually composing a
thing. I don’t understand other approaches that come up when I

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talk to other writers. For instance, some say their sole interest is
experimentation. Well, I think that you learr all you can and try
to use it. I don’t know what is meant by the word "experiment”;
you ought to be playing for keeps.

Interviewers: Yes, but there is still great admifa^on of the
so-called "experimental writing” of the twenties. What of Joyce
and Eliot?

Warren: What is "experimental writing”? James Joyce didn’t
do “experimental writing” — ^he wrote Ulysses. Eliot didn’t do
"experimental writing” — he wrote The Waste Land. When you
fail at something you call it an "experiment,” an 41ite word for
flop. Just because lines are uneven or capitals missing doesn’t
mean experiment. Literary magazines devoted to experimental
writing are usually filled with works by middle-aged or old
people.

Interviewers: Or middle-aged young people.

Warren: Young fogeys. In one way, of course, all writing that
is any good is experimental; that is, it’s a way of seeing what is
possible — what poem, what novel is possible. Experiment — they
define it as putting a question to nature, and that is true of writing
undertaken with seriousness. You put the question to human
nature — and especially your own nature — and see what comes
out. It is unpredictable. If it is predictable — not experimental in
that sense — then it will be worthless.

Interviewers; The Southern Review contained much fine work,
but little that was purely “experimental” — isn’t that so?

Warren: Yes, and there were a lot of good young, or younger,
writers in it. Not all Southern either — ^about half, I should say.

Interviewers; I remember that some of Algren’s first work
appeared there.

Warren: Oh, yes, two early stories, for example; and a longish
poem about baseball.

Interviewers: And the story, "A Bottle of Milk for Mother.”

Warren: And the story “Biceps.” And three or four of Eudora’s
first stories were there — Eudora Welty — and some of Katherine
Anne’s novelettes — Katherine Anne Porter.

Interviewers: 'There were a lot of critics in it — ^young ones too.

Warren: Oh, yes, younger then, anyway. Kenneth Burke,
F. O. Matthiessen, 'Theodore Spencer, R. P. Blackmur, Delmore
Schwartz, L. C. Knights. . . .

BOBERT PENN WARREN 179

Interviewers: Speaking of critics reminds me diat .you’ve
written criticism as ^ell as poetry, drama, and fiction. It is some-
times said that the practice of criticism is harmful to die rest; have
you found it

Warren: On this matter of criticism, something that appals me
is the idea going around now that the practice of criticism is
opposed to the literary impulse — ^is necessarily opj^sed to it. Sure,
it may be a trap, it may destroy the creative impulse, but so may
drink or money or respectability. But criticism is a perfecdy
natural human activity, and somehow the dullest, most technicsd
criticism may be associated with full creativity. Elizabethan criti-
cism is all, or nearly all, technical — ^meter, how to hang a line
together — ^kitchen criticism, how to make the cake. People deeply
interested in an art are interested in the “how.” Now I don’t mean
to say that that is the only kind of valuable criticism. Any kind is
good that gives a deeper insight into the nature of the thing — a
Marxist analysis, a Freudian study, the relation to a literary or
social tradition, the history of a theme. But we have to remember
that there is no one, single, correct kind of criticism, no com-
plete criticism. You only have different kinds of perspectives,
giving, when successful, different kinds of insights. And at one
historical moment one kind of insight may be more needed than
another.

Interviewers: But don* you think that in America now a lot of
good critical ideas get lost in terminology, in the gobbledygook
style of expression?

Warren: Every age, every group, has its jargon. When the
jargon runs away with the insight, that’s no good. Sure, a lot of
people think they have the key to truth if they have a lingo. And
a lot of modem criticism has run off into lingo, into academicism
— ^the wrong kind of academicism, that pretends to be unacademic.
The real academic job is to absorb an idea, to put it into perspec-
^ve along with other ideas, not to dilute it to lingo. As for lingo,
it’s true that some very good critics got bit by the bug that you
could develop a fixed critical vocabulary. Well, you can’t except
within narrow limits. That is a trap of scientism.

Interviewers: Do you see some new ideas in criticism now
emerging?

Warren: No, I don’t see them now. We’ve had Mr. Freud and
Mr. Marx and

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180

Interviewers: Mr. Fraser and The Golden Bough.

Warren: Yes, and Mr. Coleridge and Mr. I'urnold and Mr. Eliot
and Mr. Richards and Mr. Leavis and Mr. Aristotle, et cetera.
There have been, or are, many competing kinds of criticism with
us — ^but I don’t see a new one, or a new development of one of the
old kind. It’s an age groping for its issue.

Interviewers: What about the New Criticism?

Warren: Let’s name some of them — Richards, Eliot, Tate,
Blackmur, Winters, Brooks, Leavis (I guess). How in God’s name
can you get that gang into the same bed? There’s no bed big
enough and no blanket would stay tucked. When Ransom wrote
his book called The New Criticism, he was pointing out the vin-
dictive variety among the critics and saying that he didn’t agree
with any of them. The term is, in one sense, a term without any
referent — or with too many referents. It is a term that belongs to
the conspiracy theory of history. A lot of people— chiefly ageing,
conservative professors scared of losing prestige, or young instruc-
tors afraid of not getting promoted, middle-brow magazine
editors, and the flotsam and jetsam of semi-Marxist social-
significance criticism left stranded by history — they all had a
communal nightmare called the New Criticism to explain their
vague discomfort. I think it was something they ate.

Interviewers: What do you mean — conspiracy?

Warren: Those folks all had the paranoidal nightmare that
there was a conspiracy called the New Criticism, just to do them
personal wrong. No, it’s not quite that simple, but there is some
truth in this. One thing that a lot of so-called New Critics had in
common was a willingness to look long and hard at the literary
object. But the ways of looking might be very different. Eliot is a
lot closer to Arnold and the Archbishop of Canterbury than he is
to Yvor Winters, and Winters is a lot closer to Ir\’ing Babbitt than
to Richards, and the exegeses of Brooks are a lot closer to Coleridge
than to Ransom, and so on. There has been more nonsense talked
about this subject than about any I can think of. And a large part
of the nonsense, on any side of the question, derives from the
assumption that any one kind of criticism is “correct” criticism.
'There is no correct or complete criticism.

Interviewers: You had a piece in the New Republic once in
which you discuss Faulkner’s technique. One of the things you
emphasize is Faulkner’s technique of the “still moment.” I’ve for*

ROBERT PEKN WARREN- 181

gotten what you called it exactly — a suspension, in which time
seems to hang. *

Warren: l^at’s the frozen moment. Freeze time. Somewhere,
almost in a^ind of pun, Faulkner himself uses the image of a
frieze for such a moment of frozen action. It’s an important quality
in his work. Some of these moments harden up an event, give it its
meaning by holding it fixed. Time fluid versus time fixed. In
Faulkners work that’s the drama behind the. drama. Take a look
at Hemingway; there’s no time in Hemingway, there are only
moments in themselves, moments of action. There are no parents
and no children. If there’s a parent he is a grandparent off in
America somewhere who signs the check, like the grandfather in
A Farewell to Arms. You never see a small child in Hemingway.
You get death in childbirth but you never see a child. Ever3^thing
is outside of the time process. But in Faulkner there are always
the very old and the very young. Time spreads and is the impor-
tant thing, the terrible thing. A tremendous flux is there, things
flowing away in all directions. Moments not quite ready to be
shaped are already there, waiting, and we feel their presence.
What you most remember about Jason in The Sound and the
Fury, say, is the fact that he was the treasurer when the children
made and sold kites, and kept the money in his pocket. Or you
remember Caddy getting her drawers muddy. Everything is
already there, just waiting to happen. You have the sense of the
small becoming large in time, the large becoming small, the sweep
of time over things — that, and the balance of the frozen, abstrac-
ted moment against violent significant action. These frozen
moments are Faulkner’s game. Hemingway has a different
game. In Hemingway there’s no time at all. He’s out of history
entirely. In one sense, he tries to deny history, he says history is
the bunk, like Henry Ford.

1 am in no sense making an invidious comparison between the
fwo writers — or between their special uses of time. They are both
powerfully expressive writers. But it’s almost too pat, you know,
almost too schematic, the polar differences between those two
writers in relation to the question of time. Speaking of pairs of
writers, take Proust and Faulkner. There may be a lot written on
the subject, but 1 haven’t encountered much of it They’d make a
strange but instructive pair to study — in relation to time.

Interviewers: Wouldn’t you say that there seems to be in the

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182

early Hemingway a conscious effort not to have a very high centre
of consciousness within the form of the novel? His characters may
have a highly moral significance, but they seldom discuss issues;
they prefer to hint.

Warren: Sure, Hemingway sneaks it in, but he is an intensely
conscious and even philosophical writer. When the snuck-in thing
or the gesture works, the effect can be mighty powerful. By con-
trast, French fiction usually has a hero who deals very consciously
with the issues. He is his own chorus to the action, as well as the
man who utters the equivalent of the Elizabethan soliloquy.
Nineteenth-century fiction also dealt with the issues. Those novels
could discuss them in terms of a man’s relation to a woman, or in
terms of whether you’re going to help a slave run away, or in
terms of what to do about a man obsessed with fighting evil,
nature, what have you, in the form of a white whale.

Interviewers: Your own work seems to have this explicit char-
acter. Jack Burden in AU the Kings Men is a conscious centre and
he is a highly conscious man. He’s not there as an omniscient
figure, but is urgently trying to discover something. He is involved.

Warren: Burden got there by accident. He was only a sentence
or two in the first version — the verse play from which the novel
developed.

Interviewers: Why did you make the change?

Warren: I don’t know. He was an unnamed newspaper man, a
childhood friend of the assassin; an excuse for the young doctor,
the assassin of the politician Willie Stark, to say something before
he performed the deed. When after two years I picked up the
verse version and began to fool with a novel, the unnamed news-
paper man became the narrator. It turned out, in a way, that what
he thought about the story was more important than the story
itself. I suppose he became the narrator because he gave me the
kind of interest I needed to write the novel. He made it possible
for me to control it. He is an observer, but he is involved.

Interviewers: For ten years or more it has been said in the
United States that problems of race are an obsession of Negro
writers, but that they have no place in literature. But how can a
Negro writer avoid the problem of race?

Warren: How can you expect a Southern Negro not to write
about race, directly or indirectly, when you can’t find a Southern
white man who can avoid it?

ROBERT PENN WARREN 183

Interviewers: I must say that it’s usually white Northerners
who express a different opinion, though a few Negroes have been
seduced by it And they usually present their argument on
aesthetic gjjcamds.

Warren: I’d like to add here something about the historical
element which seems to me important for this general question.
The Negro who is now writing protest qua protest strikes me as
anachronistic. Protest qua protest denies the textures of life. The
problem is to permit the fullest range of life into racial awareness.
I don’t mean to imply that there’s nothing to protest about, but
aside from the appropriate political, sociological, and journalistic
concerns, the problem is to see the protest in its relation to other
things. Race isn’t an isolated thing — I mean as it exists in the U.S.
— ^it becomes a total symbolism for every kind of issue. They all
flow into it — and out of it. Well, thank God. It gives a little variety
to life. At the same time it proclaims the unity of life. You know
the kind of person who puts on a certain expression and then talks
about "solving” the race problem. Well, it’s the same kind of per-
son and the same kind of expression you meet when you hear the
phrase “solve the sex problem.” 'This may be a poor parallel, but
it’s some kind of parallel. Basically the issue isn’t to "solve” the
“race problem” or the “sex problem.” You don’t solve it, you just
experience it. Appreciate it.

Interviewers: Maybe that’s another version of William James’s
“moral equivalent of war.” You argue and try to keep the argument
clean, all the human complexities in view.

Warren What I’m trying to say is this. A few years ago I sat
in a room with some right-thinking friends, the kind of people
who think you look in the back of the book for every answer —
attitude A for situation A, attitude B for situation B, and so on
through the damned alphabet. It developed that they wanted a
world where everything is exactly alike and everybody is exactly
alike. They wanted a production belt of human faces and human
attitudes, and the same books on every parlour table.

Interviewers: Hell, who would want such a world?

Warren: “Right-thinkers” want it, for one thing. I don’t want
that kind of world. I want variety and pluralism — and apprecia-
tion. Appreciation in the context of some sort of justice and
decency, and freedom of choice in conduct and personal life. I’d
like a country in which there was a maximum of opportunity for

WRITERS AT WORK

184

any individual to discover his talents and develop his capacities —
discover his fullest self and by so doing learn to respect other
selves a little. Man is interesting in his differences. It’s all a ques-
tion of what you make of the differences. I’m not for differences
per se, but you just let the world live the differences, live them
out, live them up, and see how things come out. But I feel pretty
strongly about attempts to legislate indifference. That is just as
much tyranny as trying to legislate difference. Apply that to any
differences between healthy and unhealthy, criminal and non-
criminal. Furthermore, you can’t legislate the future of anybody,
in any direction. It’s not laws that are going to determine what our
great-grandchildren feel or do. The tragedy of a big half of Ameri-
can liberalism is to try to legislate virtue. You can’t legislate virtue.
You should simply try to establish conditions favourable for the
growth of virtue. But that will never satisfy the bully-boys of
virtue, the plug-uglies of virtue. They are interested in the
production-belt stamp of virtue, attitude A in the back of the
book, and not in establishing conditions of justice and decency in
which human appreciation can find play.

Listen, I’ll tell you a story. More than twenty years ago I spent
part of a summer in a little town in Louisiana, and like a good
number of the population whiled away the afternoons by going to
the local murder trials One case involved an old Negro man who
had shot a young Negro woman for talking meanness against his
baby-girl daughter. He had shot the victim with both barrels of
a twelve-gauge at a range of eight feet, while the victim was in a
crap game. There were a dozen witnc’sses to the execution. Besides
that, he had sat for half an hour on a stump outside the door of
the building where the crap game was going on, before he got
down to business. He was waiting, because a friend had lost six
dollars to the intended victim and had a.skcd the old man to hold
off till he had a chance to win it back. When the friend got the
six dollars back, the old man went to work. He never denied what
he had done. He explained it all very carefully, and why he had to
do it. He loved his baby-girl daughter and there wasn’t anything
else he could do. Then he would plead not guilty. But if he got
tried and convicted — and they couldn't fail to convict — he would
get death. If, however, he would plead guilty to manslaughter, he
could get off light. But he wouldn’t do it. He said he wasn’t guilty
of anything. The whole town got involved in the thing. Well, they

BOBEBT PENN WABBEN 185

finally cracked him. He pleaded guilty and got off light. Every-
body was glad, surf — ^they weren’t stuck with something, they
could feel good and pretty virtuous. But they felt bad, too. Some-
thing had been lost, something a lot of them could appreciate. 1
used to thfnlc I’d try to make a story of this. But I never did. It
was too complete, too self-fulfilling, as fact. But to get back to the
old man. It took him three days to crack, and when he cracked he
was nothing. Now we don’t approve of what he did — a status
homicide the sociologists call it, and that is the worst sort of homi-
cide, worse than homicide for gain, because status homicide is
irrational, and you can’t make sense of it, and it is the mark of a
low order of society. But because status homicide is the mark of a
low order of society, what are we to think about the old man’s
three-day struggle to keep his dignity? And are we to deny value
to this dignity because of the way “they” live down there?

Intebviewebs: You feel, then, that one of the great blocks in
achieving serious fiction out of sad experience is the assumption
that you’re on the right side?

Wabben: Once you start illustrating virtue as such you had
better stop writing fiction. Do something else, like Y-work. Or join
a committee. Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue,
but to show how a fellow may move towards it — or away from it.

Intebviewebs: Malraux says that “one cannot reveal the
mystery of human beings in the form of a plea for the defence.”

Wabben: Or in the form of an indictment, either.

Intebviewebs: What about the devil’s advocate?

Wabben: He can have a role, he can be Jonathan Swift or some-
thing.

Intebviewebs: I wonder what these right-thinkers feel when
they confront a Negro, say, the symbol of the underdog, and he
turns out to be a son of a bitch. What do they do — ^hold a con-
ference to decide how to treat him?

• Wabben: They must sure have a problem.

Intebviewebs: The same kind of people, they have to consult
with themselves to determine if they can laugh at certain situa-
tions in which Negroes are involved — ^like minstrel shows. A whole
world of purely American humour got lost in that shufiBe, along
with some good songs.

Wabben: It’s just goddamned hard, you have to admit, though,
to sort out things that are symbolically charged. Sometimes the

WRITERS AT WORK

186

symbolic charge is so heavy you have a hard time getting at the
real value really there. You always can, I guess, if the context is
right. But hell, a lot of people can t read a context
Interviewers: It's like the problem of Shylock in The Merchant
of Venice.

Warren: Yes, suppress the play because it might offend a Jew.
Or Oliver Twist. Well, such symbolic charges just have to be
reckoned with and taken on their own terms and in their histori*
cal perspective. As a matter of fact, such symbolic charges are
present, in one degree or another, in all relationships. 'They’re
simply stepped up and specialized in certain historical and social
situations. There are mighty few stories you can tell without offend*
ing somebody— without some implicit affront. 'The comic strip of
Ltl Abner, for instance, must have made certain persons of what is
called “Appalachian white” origin feel inferior and humiliated.
There are degrees as well as differences in these things. Context is
all. And a relatively pure heart. Relatively pure — for if you had a
pure heart you wouldn’t be in the book-writing business in the
first place. We’re stuck with it in ourselves — ^what we can write
about, if anything; what you can make articulate; what voices you
have in your insides and in your ear.

Ralph Ellison
Eugene Walter

Note: There is an integral relationship between this interview
and the interview with Ralph Ellison which appeared in issue
No. 8 of The Paris Review.

Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia was born Alberto Pincherle in 1907. He had little
formal education beyond grammar school and spent much of his
youth ill with tuberculosis.

His first novel, Gli Indifferenti, was published when he was
twenty-two. It attracted wide attention in Europe, but during a
bad translation {The Indifferent Ones, 1902) went almost un-
noticed in America. The v/ork was retranslated in 1903 as The
Time of Indifference, and on its second appearance the New York
Times said of Moravia that he was “one of the truly important
contemporary writers, as unprejudiced, observant, unsentimental
and humane as was Stendhal.”

Moravia’s best-known novels are The Conformist, which he
considers his most successful to date, and Woman of Rome, a book
which has been translated into thirteen languages. Because of an
ividerlying theme in his books, the degradation of moral principles
during his characters’ quest to stay alive, Moravia has often been
condemned for sordidness. In 1902 he was placed on the Catholic
Index. He has, however, won many honours, among them the
Strega Literary Prize and the Legion of Honour, both of which he
received in 1902.

Moravia is a prolific and versatile artist. A part-time editor for a
Milan publishing house, he is also a constant contributor to
Corriere della sera and L’Europeo.

Alberto Moravia

Via deWOca lies just off the Piazza del Popolo. A curiously shaped
street, it opens out midway to form a largo, tapering at either end,
in its brief, cobbled passage from the Lungotevere to a side of santa
Maria dei Miracoli. Its name. Street of the Goose, derives, like
those of many streets in Rome, from the signboard of an eating
house long forgotten.

On one side, extending unbroken from the Tiberside to Via
Ripetta, sprawl the houses of working-class people: a line of nar-
row doorways with dark, dank little stairs, cramped windows, a
string of tiny shops; the smells of candied fruit, repair shops,
wines of the CasteUi, engine exhaust; the cry of street urchins, the
test-roar of a Guzzi, a caterwaul from a court.

On the opposite side the buildings are taller, vaguely out of
place, informed with the sc. ene imperiousness of unchipped cor-
nices and balconies overspilling with potted vines, tended
creepers: homes of the well-to-do. It is here, on this side, that
Alberto Moravia lives, in the only modern structure in the neigh-
bourhood, the building jutting like a jade and ivory dike into the
surrounding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century red-gold.

The door is opened by the maid, a dark girl wearing the con-
ventional black dress and white apron. Moravia is behind her in
the entry, checking the arrival of a case of wine. He turns. The
interviewers may go into the parlour. He’ll be in directly.

Moravia’s living-room, at first sight, is disappointing. It has the
elegant, formal anonymity of a Parioli apartment rented by a film
actor, but smaller; or that of a reception room at the Swiss Lega-
tion, without the travel folders— or reading matter of any sort.
There is very little furniture, and this is eighteenth-century. Four

189

WRITERS AT WORK

190

paintings adorn the walls: two Guttusos, a MartineUi, and, over a
wide blue sofa, a Toti Scialoja. At either evil of the sofa, an arm-
chair; bracketed between the chairs and sofa, a long low Venetian
coffee table inlaid with antique designs of the constellations and
signs of the zodiac. The powder blue and old rose of the table are
repeated in the colours of the Persian rug beneath. A record
cabinet stands against the opposite wall; it contains Bach, Scar-
latti, Beethovens Ninth and some early quartets, Stravinsky, Pro-
kofiev, Monteverdis Orfeo. The impersonality of the room seems
almost calculated. Only the view from the windows recalls the
approaching spring; flowers blossom on roof-terraces, the city is
warm, red in the westering sun. Suddenly Moravia enters. He is
tall, elegant, severe; the geometry of his face, its reflections, are
cold, almost metallic; his voice is low, also metallic — one thinks, in
each case, of gunmetal. One detects a trace of unease, shyness
perhaps, in his manner, but he is at home in his parlour; he settles
comfortably on the sofa and crosses his legs.

Interviewers: May we start at the beginning?

Moravia: At the beginning?

Interviewers: You were bom . . .

Moravia: Oh. I was born here. 1 was born in Rome on the
twenty-eighth of November, 1907.

Interviewers: And your education?

Moravia: My education, my formal education that is, is practi-
cally nil. I have a grammar-school diploma, no more. Just nine
years of schooling. I had to drop out because of tuberculosis of the
bone. I spent, altogether, five years in bed with it, between the
ages of nine and seventeen — till 1904.

Interviewers: Then 'Inverno di malato" must refer to those
years. One understands how

Moravia: You aren’t suggesting that I’m Girolamo, are you?

Interviewers: Well, yes. . . .

Moravu: I’m not. Let me say

Interviewers (cautiously): It’s the same disease.

Moravia: Let me say here and now that I do not appear in any
of my works.

Interviewers: Maybe we can return to this a little later.

Moravia: Yes. But I want it quite clearly understood: my works
are not autobiographical in the usual meaning of the word. Per-
haps I can put it this way; whatever is autobiographical is so in

ALBERTO MORAVIA 191

only a very indirect manner, in a very general way. I am related
to Girolamo, but I aiSi not Girolamo. 1 do not take, and have never
taken, either action or characters directly from life. Events may
suggest evei^ts to be used in a work later; similarly, persons may
suggest fufure characters; but suggest is the word to remember.
One writes abdiit what one knows. For instance, I can't say I know
America, though I’ve visited there. I couldn’t write about it. Yes,
one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something
else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always
end by falsifying and fictionalizing — I’m a liar, in fact. That means
I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what 1 know.

Interviewers: Fine. In any case, your first work was Gli In-
differenti.

Moravu: Yes.

Interviewers: Will you tell us something about it?

Moravia: What do you want to know? I started it in October
1905. I wrote a good deal of it in bed — at Cortona, at Morra’s,^
incidentally. It was published in .

Interviewers: Was there much opposition to it? From the
critics, that is? Or, even, from the reading public?

Moravia {taking the defensive): Opposition? What kind of
opposition?

Interviewers: I mean, coming after D’Annunzio, at the height
of Fragmentism and prose darte . . .

Moravu: Oh. . . . No, th>re was no opposition to it at all. It was
a great success. In fact, it was one of the greatest successes in all
modern Italian literature. The greatest, actually; and I can say
this with all modesty. There had never been anything like it. Cer-
tainly no book in the last fifty years has been greeted with such
unanimous enthusiasm and excitement.

Interviewers: And you were quite young at the time.

Moravu: Twenty-one. There were articles in the papers, some
of them running to five full columns. It was without precedent,
the book’s success. (Pausing): I may add that nothing approaching
it has happened to me since — or, for that matter, to anyone else.

Interviewers: CUi Indifferenti has been interpreted as a rather
sharp, even bitter, efificient criticism of the Roman bourgeoisie,

'Count Umberto Moira di Lavriano, literary critic; historian, translator,
responsible for the introduction of Virginia Woolfs writings to Italy; now
director of die Sodetk Italiana per I'Organizzazione Intemazionale.

WRITEBS AT WORK

192

and of bourgeois values in general. Was it written in reaction
against the society you saw about you? '

Moravia: No. Not consciously, at least. (Reconsidering; pres-
ently, with finality): It was not a reaction against anything. It was
a novel.

Interviewers: Those critics who have cast ^ou along with
Svevo are wrong, then, you would say?

Moravia: Quite. Yes, quite. To tell the truth, Svevo is a writer
I don’t know at all well. I read him, and then only SenUitd [As a
Man Grows Older], and what’s the other one? — La Coscienza di
Zeno [Confessions of Zeno] — after I had written Gli Indifferenti.
’There's no question of influence, certainly. Furthermore, Svevo
was a conscious critic of the bourgeoisie; my own criticism, what-
ever there is, is unintentional, occurring entirely by chance. In my
view, the function of a writer is not to criticize anyway; only to
create living characters. Just that.

Interviewers: You write, then ?

Moravia: I write simply to amuse myself; 1 write to entertain
others and — ^and, well, to express myself. One has one’s own way
of expressing oneself, and writing happens to be mine.

Interviewers: By that, you do not consider yourself a moralist,
do you?

Moravia: No, I most emphatically do not. Truth and beauty are
educatory in themselves. The very fact of representing the left
wing, or a “wing” of any sort, implies a partisan position and non-
objectivity. For that reason, one is impotent to criticize in a valid
sense. Social criticism must necessarily, and always, be an ex-
tremely superficial thing. But don’t misunderstand me. Writers,
like all artists, are concerned to represent reality, to create a more
absolute and complete reality than reality itself. They must, if
they are to accomplish this, assume a moral position, a clearly
conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude; in conse-
quence, their beliefs are, of course, going to find their way into
their work. What artists believe, however, is of secondary impor-
tance, ancillary to the work itself. A writer survives in spite of his
beliefs. Lawrence will be read whatever one thinks of his notions
on sex. Dante is read in the Soviet Union.

A work of art, on the other hand, has a representative and ex-
pressive function. In this representation the author’s ideas, his
judgments, the author himself, are engaged with reality. Criticism,

ALBERTO MORAVIA 193

thus, is no more thai|| a part, an aspect — a minor aspect — of the
whole. I suppose, putting it this way, 1 am, after all, a moralist to
some degree. We all are. You know, sometimes you wake up in the
morning in^rcvolt against everything. Nothing seems right. And
for that day or so, at least until you get over it, you’re a moralist.
Put it this way: every man is a moralist in his owix fashion, but he
is many other things besides.

Interviewers: May we return to GU Indifferenti for just a
moment? Did you feel when you were working on it that you
faced particular problems of technique?

Moravu: There was one big one in my attempt — ^borrowing a
drama technique to begin and end the story within a brief, clearly
delimited period, omitting nothing. All the action, in fact, takes
place within two days. The characters dine, sleep, entertain them-
selves, betray one another; and that, succinctly, is all. And every-
thing happens, as it were, “on stage.”

Interviewers: Have you written for the stage?

Moravia: A little. There’s a stage adaptation of GU IndifferenH
which I made with Luigi Squarzina, and I’ve written one play
myself. La Mascherata [The Fancy Dress Forty].

Interviewers: Based on the book?

Moravia: Not exactly. The idea’s the same; much of the action
has been changed, however. It’s being put on in Milan by the
Piccolo Teatro.

Interviewers: Do you iu’ md to continue writing plays?

Moravia: Yes. Oh, yes, I hope to go on. My interest in the
theatre dates back a good many years. Even as a youngster I read,
and I continue to read and enjoy, plays — ^for the most part, the
masters: Shakespeare, other of the Elizabethans, Moli^re, Goldoni,
the Spanish theatre, Lope de Vega, Calder6n. I’m drawn most, in
my reading, to tragedy, which, in my opinion, is the greatest of all
forms of artistic expression, the theatre itself being the most com-
piete of literary forms. Unfortunately, contemporary drama is non-
existent.

Interviewers: How’s that? You mean, perhaps, in Italy.

Moravia; No. Simply that there is no modem drama. Not that
it’s not being staged, but that none has been written.

Interviewers: But O’Neill, Shaw, Pirandello . . .

Moravia: No, none of them. Neither O’Neill, Shaw, Pirandello,
nor anyone else has created drama — ^tragedy — ^in the deepest

WBITEBS AT WOBK

194

meaning of the word. The basis of drama i^language, poetic lan-
guage. Even Ibsen, the greatest of modem ^amatists, resorted to
everyday language and, in consequence, by my definition failed
to create true drama.

Intebviewebs: Christopher Fry writes poetic dramas. You may
have seen The JLadys Not for Burning at the Eliseo.

Mobavia: No.

Intebviewebs: You might appipve of him.

Mobavia: I might. I’d have to see first.

Intebviewebs: And your film work?

Mobavia: Script writing, you mean? I haven’t actually done
much, and what little I’ve done I haven’t particularly enjoyed.

Intebviewebs: Yet it is another art form.

Mobavu: Of course it is. Certainly. Wherever there is crafts-
manship there is art. But the question is this: up to what point will
the motion picture permit full expression? The camera is a less
complete instrument of expression than the pen, even in the hands
of an Eisenstein. It will never be able to express all, say, that
Proust was capable of. Never. For all that, it is a spectacular
medium, overflowing with life, so that the work is not entirely a
grind. It’s the only really alive art in Italy today, owing to its great
Vandal backing. But to work for motion pictures is exhausting.
And a writer is never able to be more than an idea-man or a
scenarist — an underling, in effect. It offers him little satisfaction
apart ftom the pay. His name doesn’t even appear on the posters.
For a writer it’s a bitter job. What’s more, the films are an impure
art, at the mercy of a welter of mechanisms — gimmicks, I think
you say in English — ficelles. There is little spontaneity. This is only
natural, of course, when you consider the hundreds of mechanical
devices that are used in making a film, the army of technicians.
The whole process is a cut and dried affair. One’s inspiration
grows stale working in motion pictures; and worse, one’s mind
grows accustomed to for ever looking for gimmicks and by so
doing is eventually ruined, shot. I don’t like film work in the
least. You understand what I mean: its compensations are not,
in a real sense, worth while; hardly worth the money unless you
need it.

Intebviewebs: Could you tell us a little about La Romana
[Woman of Rome]?

Mobavu: La Romana started out as a short story for the third

ALBERTO MORAVIA

195

page.^ 1 began it on^ovember 1, 1905. 1 had intended it to run to
no more than three or four typescript pages, treating the relations
between a woman and her daughter. But I simply went on
writing. Fqiur months later, by March 1, the first draft was finished.

Interviewers: It was not a case of the tail running away with
the dog? *

Moravu: It was a case, simply, of my thinking initially that I
had a short story and finding four months later that it was a novd
instead.

Interviewers: Have there been times when characters have got
out of hand?

Moravia: Not in anything I’ve published. Whenever characters
get out of control, it’s a sign that the work has not arisen from
genuine inspiration. One doesn’t go on then.

Interviewers: Did you work from notes on La Romana?
Rumour has it

Moravu: Never. I never work from notes. I had met a woman
of Rome— ten years before. Her life had nothing to do with the
novel, but I remembered her, she seemed to set off a spark. No, I
have never taken notes or ever even possessed a notebook. My
work, in fact, is not prepared beforehand in any way. I might add,
too, that when I’m not working I don’t think of my work at all.
When I sit. down to write — ^that’s between nine and twelve every
morning, and I have never, incidentally, written a line in the after-
noon or at night — ^when I sit at my table to write, I never know
what it’s going to be till I’m under way. I trust in inspiration,
which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. But I don’t sit
back waiting for it. I work every day.

Interviewers: I suppose you were helped some by your wife^
The psychology . . .

Moravu: Not at all. For the psychology of my characters, and
for every other aspect of my work, I draw solely upon my experi-
ence; but understand, never in a documentary, a textbook, sense.
No, I met a Roman woman called Adriana. Ten years afterwards
I wrote the novel for which she provided the first impulse. She has
probably never read the book. I only saw her that once; I ima-
gined everything, I invented everything.

Interviewers: A fantasia on a real theme? .

’ In Italian newspapers, the third page is devoted to fiction and articles of
general cultural interest in the leading papers by the country’s first writers.

WRITERS AT WORK

196

Moravia; Don’t confuse imagination and fantasy; they are two
distinct actions of the mind. Benedetto Croce makes a great dis-
tinction between them in some of his best pages. All artists must
have imagination, some have fantasy. Science fiction^ or — ^well,
Ariosto . . . that’s fantasy. For imagination, take Madame Bovary.
Flaubert has great imagination, but absolutely no fantasy.

Interviewers: It’s interesting that your most sympathetic char-
acters are invariably women: La Romana, La Provindale, La
Messicana

Moravu: But that’s not a fact. Some of my most sympathetic
characters have been men, or boys like Michele in Gli Indifferenti,
or Agostino in Agostino, or Luca in La Disubbedienza. I’d say, in
fact, that most of my protagonists are sympathetic.

Interviewers: Marcello Clerici too? [The Conformist],

Moravia: Yes, Clerici too. Didn’t you think Iiim so?

Interviewers: Anything but — ^more like Pratolini’s Eroe del
nostro tempo. You don’t mean that you actually felt some affection
for him?

Moravia: Affection, no. More, pity. He was a pitiable character
— ^pitiable because a victim of circumstance, led astray by the
times, a traviato. But certainly he was not negative. And here
we’re closer to the point. I have no negative characters. I don’t
think it’s possible to write a good novel around a negative per-
sonality.

For some of my characters I have felt affection, though.

Interviewers: For Adriana.

Moravia: For Adriana, yes. Certainly for Adriana.

Interviewers: Working without notes, without a plan or out-
line or anything, you must make quite a few revisions.

Moravia: Oh, yes, that I do do. Each book is worked over
several times. I like to compare my method with that of painters
centuries ago, proceeding, as it were, from layer to layer. ’The first
draft is quite crude, far from being perfect, by no means finished;
although even then, even at that point, it has its final structure, the
form is visible. After that I rewrite it as many times — apply as
many “layers” — as I feel to be necessary.

Interviewers: Which is how many as a rule?

Moravia: Well, La Romana was written twice. Then I went
over it a third time, very carefully, minutely, until I had it the way
I wanted it, till I was satisfied.

ALBEHTO MORAVIA 197

Interviewers: Two drafts, then, and a final, detailed correction
of the second manuscript, is that it?

Moravu: Yes.

Interviea^ers: And that’s usually the case, two drafts?

Moravia: Ygs. {Thinking for a moment): It was three times with
II Conformista, too.

Interviewers: Who do you consider to have influenced you?
For example, when you wrote Git Indifferenti?

Moravu: It's diflicult to say. Perhaps, as regards narrative tech-
nique, Dostoevski and Joyce.

Interviewers: Joyce?

Moravu: Well, no — ^let me explain. Joyce only to the extent
that I learned from him the use of the time element bound with
action. From Dostoevski I had an understanding of the intricacies
of the dramatic novel. Crime and Punishment interested me
greatly, as technique.

Interviewers: And other preferences, other influences? Do you
feel, for instance, that your realism stems from the French?

Moravu: No, No, I wouldn’t say so. If there is such a deriva-
tion, I’m not at all conscious of it. I consider my literary antece-
dents to be Manzoni, Dostoevski, Joyce. Of the French, I like,
primarily, the eighteenth century, Voltaire, Diderot; then, Sten-
dhal, Balzac, Maupassant.

Interviewers: Flaubert?

Moravu: Not particularly.

Interviewers: Zola?

Moravu: Not at all! . . . I’ve got a splitting headache. I’m sorry.
{Draining his glass): Here, have some more. Will you take some
coffee? Where was I?

Interviewers; You don’t like Zola. Do you read any of the
poets?

• Moravu: 1 like Rimbaud and Baudelaire very much and some
modem poets who are like Baudelaire.

Interviewers: And in English?

Moravu: I like Shakespeare — everybody has to say this, but
then it’s true, it’s necessary. I like Dickens, Poe. Many years ago I
tried translating some poems from John Donne I like the novel-
ists: Butler, there’s a beautiful novel. Among the more recent,
’Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad — I think he's a great writer — some
of Stevenson, some of Woolf. Didcens is good only in Pickwick

WRITEBS AT WORK

198

Papers; the rest is no good. (My next book wtfl be a little like that
— no plot) I have aways preferred comic books to tragic books.
My great ambition is to write a comic book, but, as you know, it’s
the most difficult thing of all. How many are there?' How many
can you name? Not many: Don Quixote, Rabelais^ The Pickwick
Papers, The Golden Ass, the Sonnets of Belli, Gogol’s Dead Souls,
Boccaccio and the Satyricon — these are my ideal books. I would
give all to have written a book like Gargantua. {He smiles.) My
literary education, as you will have seen by now, has been for the
most part classical — classical prose and classical drama. The
realists and naturalists, to be perfectly frank, don’t interest me
very much.

Interviewers: They do interest, apparently, and have had a
considerable influence upon the young writers who have appeared
since the war. Especially the Americans seem to have been an
influence: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos. . . .

Moravia: Yes, that’s quite so from what I know of postwar
Italian writing. But the influence has been indirect: distilled
through Vittorini. Vittorini has been the greatest of all influences
upon the younger generation of ItaUan writers. 'The influence is
American just the same, as you suggest; but Vittorini-ized Ameri-
can. I was once judge in a competition-held by L’Unitd to award
prizes for fiction. Out of fifty manuscripts submitted, a ^ood half
of them were by young writers influenced by Vittorini — ^Vittorini
and the sort of “poetic” prose you can find in Hemingway in
places, and in Faulkner.

Interviewers: Still, editing Nuovi argomenti you must see a
great deal of new writing.

Moravia: How I wish I didi Italian writers are lazy. All in all,
I receive very little. Take our symposium on Communist art. We
were promised twenty-five major contributions. And how many
did we get? Just imagine — ^three. It’s really a task running .a
review in Italy. What we need, and don’t get, are literary and
political essays of length, twenty to thirty pages. We get lots of
little four- and five-page squibs; only that’s not what we’re looking
for.

Interviewers: But I meant fiction. Editing Nuovi argomenti,
you must know more about modem Italian fiction than you admit.

Moravia: No; quite tmtliully, I know only those writers every-
body knows. Besides, you don’t have to read everything to know

ALBERTO MORAVIA

199

\vhat you like. I'd rather not name any names; there would be
terrible gaps and gaffes.

Interviewers: How do you account for the big empty spaces
in the nove] tradition of Italy? Could you tell us a little about the
novel in Italy?

Moravu: Tliat’s a pretty large question, isn't it? (He frowns,
then smiles.) But I'll by to answer. I think one could say that Italy
has had the novel, way back. When the bourgeois was really
bourgeois, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, narrative was
fully developed (remember that all that painting was narrative
too) but since the Counter Reformation, Italian society doesn't like
to look at itself in a mirror. The main bulk of narrative literature
is, after all, criticism in one form or another. In Italy when they say
something is beautiful that's the last word: Italians prefer beauty
to truth. The art of the novel, too, is connected wiA the growth
and development of the European bourgeoisie. Italy hasn't yet
achieved a modem bourgeoisie. Italy is really a very old country;
in some ways it looks new because it’s so old. Culturally, now, it
follows the rest of Europe: does what the others do, but later. (He
pauses, thoughtfully.) Another thing — ^in our literary history, there
are great writers — titans — but no middle-sized ones. Petrarch
wrote in the thirteenth century, then for four centuries everybody
imitated him. Boccaccio completely exhausted the possibilities of
the Italian short story in the fourteenth century. Our golden cen-
turies were then, our liteiary language existed then, had crystal-
lized. England and France had their golden centuries much later.
Take, for example, Dante. Dante wrote a pure Italian, is still per-
fectly understandable. But his contemporary Chaucer wrote in a
developing tongue: today he must be practically translated for the
modem reader. That’s why most modern Italian writers are not
very Italian, and must look abroad for their masters: because their
tradition is so far back there, is really medieval. In the last ten
years, they’ve looked to America for their masters.

Interviewers: Will you tell us something now about your
Racconti romani?

Moravia: There’s not much I can say about them. They de-
scribe the Roman lower'classes and petite bourgeoisie in a particu-
lar period after the war.

Interviewers: Is that all? I mean, there’s nothing you can add
to that?

WRITERS AT WORK

200

Moravu: What can I add? Well, no, realljj — ^really there’s quite
a bit I can say. There's always a lot I can say about my last
publication. Ask me questions and 111 try to answer whatever you
ask.

Interviewers; To be truthful. I’ve read only one of them. I
don’t usuaUy see the Coniere della sera, and the book itself is
rather expensive

Moravu (Smiling): Twenty-four hundred lire.

Interviewers: In any case, you have not heretofore, or at least
not often, dealt with the lower classes and petite bourgeoise. These
stories are a clear departure from your previous work. Perhaps
you might say something about any problems in particular that
you faced in writing them.

Moravu: Each of my books is the result, if not of predesign,
of highly involved thought. In writing the Racconti romani there
were specific problems I had to cope with — ^problems of language.
Let me begin this way: up to I Racconti romani all of my works
had been written in the third person, even when, as in La Romana
and since — in the novel I have just finished — told in the first per-
son. By third person I mean simply expressing oneself in a sus-
tained literary style, the style of the author. I’ve explained this, by
the way, in a note to the Penguin edition of Woman of Rome. In
the Racconti romani, on the other hand, I adopted for the first
time the language of the character, the language of the first per-
son; but then again, not the language precisely, rather the tone of
the language. There were advantages and disadvantages in taking
this tack. Advantages for the reader in that he was afforded
greater intimacy; he entered directly into the heart of things; he
was not standing outside peeping in. The method was essentially
photographic. The great disadvantage of the first person consists
of the tremendous limitations imposed upon what the author can
say. I could deal only with what the subject himself might deal
with, speak only of what the subject might speak of. I was even
further restricted by the fact that, say, a taxi driver could not
speak with any real knowledge even of a washerwoman’s work,
whereas in the third person I might permit myself to speak of
whatever I wished. Adriana, the Woman of Rome, speaking in my
third-first person, could speak of anything in Rome that I myself,
also a Roman, could speak of.

The use of the first-person mode in treating the Roman lower

ALBERTO MORAVIA 201

classes implies, of course, the use of dialect. And the use of dia-
lect imposes stringent limitations upon one’s material. You cannot
say in dialect all that you may say in the language itself. Even
Belli, the jnaster of romanesco, could speak of certain things, but
was prevented from speaking of others. The working classes are
narrowly restricted in their choice of expression^ and personally I
am not particularly predisposed to dialect literature. Dialect
is an inferior form of expression because it is a less cultivated
form. It . does have its fascinating aspects, but it remains
cruder, more imperfect, than the language itself. In dialect
one expresses chiefly, and quite well, primal urges and
exigent necessities— eating, sleeping, drinking, making love, and
so forth.

In the Racconti romam — there are sixty-one in the volume,
though I’ve written more than a hundred of them now; they are
my chief source of income — ^the spoken language is Italian, but
the construction of the language is irregular, and there is here
and there an occasional word in dialect to capture a particular
vernacular nuance, the flavour and raciness of romanesco. It is the
only book in which I’ve tried to create comic characters or stories
— ^for a time everybody thought I had no sense of humour.

I’ve tried in these stories, as I have said, to depict the life of
the sub-proletariat and the trds petite bourgeoisie in a period just
after the last war, with the black market and all the rest. The
genre is picaresque. The picaro is a character who lives exclusively
as an economic being, the Marxist archetype, in that his first con-
cern is his belly: eating. There is no love, genuine romantic love;
rather, and above all, the one compelling fact that he must eat or
perish. For this reason, the picaro is also an arid being. His life is
one of trickery, deception, dishonesty if you will. The life of feel-
ings, and with it the language of sensibility, begin on a rather
more elevated level.

Interviewers: Themes have a way of recurring throughout
your work.

Moravia: Of course. Naturally. In the works of every writer
with any body of work to show for his effort, you wiU find recur-
rent themes. 1 view the novel, a single novel as well as a writer’s
entire corpus, as a musical composition in which the characters
are themes, from variation to variation completing an entire para-
bola; similarly fpr the themes themselves. This simile of a musical

G«

WRITERS AT WORK

202

composition comes to mind, I think, because, of my approach to
my material; it is never calculated and predesigned, but rather
instinctive: worked out by ear, as it were.

Interviewers: One last book now. We can’t discu* s, them aU.
But will you teU us something about La Mascherata? That, and
how it ever got by the censors.

Moravia: Ah, now that you mention it, that was one time when
I was concerned to write social criticism. The only time, however.
In 1906, 1 went to Mexico, and the Hispano-American scene sug>
gested to me the idea for a satire. I returned and for several years
toyed with the idea. Then, in 1900, 1 went to Capri and wrote it.
What happened afterwards — you asked about the censors — is an
amusing story. At least it seems amusing now. It was 1900. We
were in the full flood of war. Fascism, censorship, et cetera, et
cetera. The manuscript, once ready, like all manuscripts, had to
be submitted to the Ministry of Popular Culture for approval. This
Ministry, let me explain, was overrun by grammar-school teachers
who received three hundred lire, about six or seven thousand now,
for each book they read. And, of course, to preserve their sine-
cures, whenever possible they turned in negative judgments. Well,
I submitted the manuscript. But whoever read it, not wishing to
take any position on the book, passed it to the Under Secretary;
the Under Secretary, with similar qualms passed it to the Secretary;
the Secretary to the Minister; and the Minister, finally — to
Mussolini.

Interviewers: I suppose, then, you were called on the
carpet?

Moravia: Not at all. Mussolini ordered the book to be pub-
lished.

Interviewers: Oh!

Moravu: And it was. A month later, however, I received an
unsigned communication notifying me that the book was bein^
withdrawn. And that was that. The book didn’t appear again till
after the Liberation.

Interviewers: Was that your only tilt with the censors?

Moravia: Oh, no; not by any means! I’ve been a lifelong anti-
Fascist. There was a running battle between me and the Fascist
authorities beginning in ’09 and ending with the German occupa-
tion in 1903, when I had to go into hiding in the mountains, near
the southern front, where I waited nine months until the Allies

ALBERTO MORAVIA 203

arrived. Time and again my books were not allowed to be men-
tioned in the press. Many times by order of the Ministry of Cul-
ture I lost jobs I held on newspapers, and for some years I was
forced to v|^e under the pen name of Pseudo.

Censorship is an awful thingl (Leaning forward to push back
his cognac glass and vigorously stroking the glass, top of the coffee
table with his forefinger): And a damned hardy plant once it bdces
rootl The Ministry of Culture was the last to close up shop. I sent
Agostino to them two months before the fall of Fascism, two
months before the end. While all about them everything was
toppling, falling to ruin, the Ministry of Popular Culture was
doing business as usual. Approval looked not to be forthcoming;
so one day I went up there, to Via Veneto — ^you know the place;
they’re still there, incidentally; I know them all — ^to see what the
trouble was. They told me that they were afraid that they wouldn’t
be able to give approval to the book. My dossier was lying open
on the desk, and when the secretary left the room for a moment I
glanced at it. There was a letter from the Brazilian cultural attach^
in it, some poet, informing the Minister that in Brazil I was con-
sidered a subversive. In Brazil of all places! But that letter, that
alone, was enough to prevent the book’s publication. Another time
— ^it was for Le Ambizioni sbagliate [The Wheel of Fortune] —
when I went up, I found the manuscript scattered all over the
place, in several different offices, with a number of different people
reading parts of it! Censorship is a monstrous, a monstrous thingl
I can tell you all you want to know about it.

They started cat, however, rather liberal. With time they grew
worse. Besides filling up the Ministry with timid grammar-school
teachers, the censors were also either bureaucrats or failed writers;
and heaven help you if your book fell into the hands of one of
those "writers”!

^Interviewers: And how is it for the writer today? You said the
censors were “still there.”

Moravia: The writer has nothing to fear. He can publish what-
ever he wishes. It’s those in the cinema, and in the theatre, who
have it bad.

Interviewers: What about the Index?

> loRAviA: The Index isn’t really censorship, at least not in Italy.
The Vatican is one thing and Italy is another, two separate and
distinct states. If it were to come to power in Italy, or if it were

204 WRITERS AT WORK

to gain the power that it has in Ireland or Sp'ijn, then it would be
very serious.

Interviewers: One would have thought, however, by your pro-
test when you were placed on the Index, that you regarded it as
an abridgment of your freedom as a writer.

Moravia: No, it wasn't that. I was certainly upset, but mostly
because I disliked the scandal.

Interviewers: Anyway, it must have increased your sales. I re-
member, it was about then that Bompiani started bringing out
your collected works in de-luxe editions.

Moravia: No, in Italy the Index doesn’t affect one’s sales one
way or the other. I’ve always sold well, and there was no appreci-
able rise in sales after the Index affair.

Interviewers: You do not see the possibility of Italy’s falling to
a new totalitarian regime?

Moravia: There’s the possibility, but a quite remote one. If we
were to come under a new totalitarianism, writers, I now believe,
would have no decent recourse but to give up writing altogether.

Interviewers: Incidentally, what do you Uiink of the future of
the novel?

Moravia: Well, the novel as we knew it in the nineteenth cen-
tury was killed off by Proust and Joyce. They were the last of the
nineteenth-century writers — ^great writers. It looks now as if we
were going towards the roman d idde or towards the documen-
tary novel — either the novel of ideas, or else the novel of life as it
goes on, with no built-up characters, no psychology. It’s also
apparent that a good novel can be of any kind, but the two forms
that are prevalent now are the essay-novel and the documentary
novel or personal experience, quelque chose qui arrive. Life has
taken two ways in our time: the crowd and the intellectuals. The
day of the crowd is all accident; the day of the intellectual is all
philosophy. 'There is no bourgeoisie now, only the crowd and the
intellectu^.

Interviewers: What about "literature as scandal" that so con-
cerns the French?

Moravia (smiling): Oh, it’s going on thirty years now that
they’ve been scandalizing one another.

Interviewers: And in your own work, do you see a new direc-
tion?

Moravu: I'll go on writing novels and short stories.

ALBERTO MORAVIA 205

Interviewers: Y^u do not foresee a time, then, when you will
occupy your mornings otherwise.

Moravia: I do not foresee a time when I shall feel that I have
nothing ti^fty.

Anna Maria de Dominicis
Ben Johnson .

Nelson Algren

The Man with the Golden Arm received the National Book Award
as the most distinguished American novel published in 1909.
Nelson Algren’s other books include three novels, Somebody in
Boots ' Never Come Morning , and A Walk on the
Wild Side > a volume of short stories called The Neon
Wilderness '> and his impressions of a city, Chicago: City on

the Make . For most of his life he has lived in or near

Chicago, which has provided the setting for much of his work.

Algren was bom in 1909 in Detroit. After being graduated from
the University of Illinois, he spent the depression years wandering
through the American Southwest as a migratory worker. His 6rst
short story was based on letters written to a friend from an aban-
doned Sinclair filling station just outside Rio Hondo. Entitled “So
Help Me," it was som to Story Magazine for twenty-five dollars.

^Before the war Algren worked on a WPA Writer’s Project, and
also served as a worker on venereal-disease control for the
Chicago Board of Health. After his discharge from the Army —
where he served as a medical corpsman in Europe — ^he returned
to Chicago’s West Side and started work on The Man with the
Golden Arm.

Algren lives at present in Gary, Indiana, outside Chicago, work-
ing in a bungalow-writing, as Budd Schulberg has described
him, “like no one else in America today . . . from a orilliant, sordid,
uncompromising, and twisted imagination.’’

Nelson Algren

The interview took place in a dark and untidy Greenwich Village
walk-up fat in the faU of 1905. A number of visitors dropped in
to listen to Algren. Word had spread that he was giving an inter-
view, and in that quarter of the City Algren is highly respected.

He makes his living writing, has no set routine for working at it,
nor seriously feels the need of one; he finds that he works best, or
most frequently, at night, and he composes on the typewriter. He
strikes one as a man who feels and means just what he says, and
often says it in the same way he dresses-^ith a good-humoured
nonchalance that is at once uniquely American and, in the latter-
day sense, quite un-American: his tie, if he ever wore one, would
very likely be as askew as his syntax often is. He is a man who
betrays no inclination whatsoever towards politeness, but he has
a natural generosity and compassion. To talk with Algren is to
have a conversation brought very quickly to that rarefied level
where values are actually declared.

Interviewebs: Did you have any trouble getting The Man with
the Golden Arm published?

Algren: No, no. Nothing was easier, because I got paid before
I wrote it. It got a very lucky deal because they had an awful lot of
money, the publishers did, during the war. Doubleday had a big
backlog. I was working for Harper’s — ^that is. I’d done one novel.
Under the way they operate— well, it’s a very literary house; I
mean, they’d give you, oh, maybe a five-hundred-dollar advance
and then you’re on your own. And then if the bbok goes on two
years — ^well, but I mean, you take the risk. The^ pay in literaiy
prestige, they have an editor who once edited something by
Thomas Wolfe or something; they figure that way. And I didn’t
see it, just didn’t know what the score was, you see. So a guy from

209

WRITERS AT WORK

210

Doubleday came along, and I said what I M’anted was enough to
live on by the week for a year. And he said, “What do you call
enough to live on?” and I said, “Fifty dollars,” which seemed like
a lot to me then — and he said, “Well, how about siit}' dollars for
two years?” He raised it himself, see; I mean, they were author-
stealing, of course, and ah— well, I had a very ^ad contract at
Harper's anyhow. So they gave me that sixty-a-week deal for two
years, which was very generous then, and — I told them I was
going to write a war novel. But it turned out to be this Golden
Arm thing. I mean, the war kind of slipped away, and these people
with the hypos came along — and that was it. But they had so
much money it was fantastic. It's very hard to get out of the habit
of thinking you're going to kill them if you ask for fifty a week.

Interviewers: Which of your books sold the most?

Alcren: That was the only book that sold. The others never
sold much except in paperbacks.

Interviewers: Do you think of The Man with the Golden Arm
as being very autobiographical?

Alcren: Oh, to some extent I drew on some people 1 knew in a
half way. I made some people up and ah . . . the “Dealer” was . . .
sort of a mixture; I got two, I dunno, two, tliree guys in mind. I
know a couple guys around there. I knew one guy especially had
a lot of those characteristics, but it's never clearly one person.

Interviewers: Well, anyway, you do think of some one person
who could have started you thinking about Frankie Machine,
since, apparently, you had at first planned an entirely different
book.

Alcren: The only connection I can make is . . . well, I was
thinking about a war novel, and I had a buddy — ^little Italian
bookie — ^pretty good dice-shooter, and he always used that phrase.
We'd go partners — ^he's a fairly good crap-shooter — I mean, he’s
always good for about three passes. And then I'd say, “Pick it t^p,
Joe, pick it up,” and he'd say, "Don’t worry, gotta golden arm.”
Then he'd come out with a crap. He never picked it up at all —
but that's where I got that title. That was a guy I knew in the
Army. It has no connection, it just happened to fit in later.

Interviewers: How do you think you arrived at it thematically
— rather than a war novel?

Alcren: Well, if you're going to write a war novel, you have to
do it while you're in the war. If you don’t do the thing while

NELSON ALGBEN

211

you’re there — at leant the way I operate — ^you can’t do it It slips
away. Two months after the war it was gone; but I was living in
a living situation, and ... I find it pretty hard to write on anytl^g
in the pafj^f . . and this thing just got more real; I mean, the
neighbourhood I was living in, and these people, were a lot more
real than the Aimy was.

Intebviewehs: What was the neighbourhood you were living
in?

Algben: Near Division Street

Intebviewebs: Was this one of those books thai "wrote itself’’?

Algben: No. No, it didn’t write itself. But I didn’t have to con-
trive it. I mean, the situation hits you and you react to it, that’s all.

Intebviewebs: Did it occur to you that this might be an unusual
treatment of tragedy, using a protagonist like Frankie Machine?

Algben: No, I didn’t think of it that way at all. I didn’t think
of it essentially as a tragedy. I was just going along with that situ-
ation, and — well. I’d already written the book; I mean. I’d spent
almost two years on the book before I ever ran into a drug addict.
I wasn’t acquainted with that situation at all. I had the book writ-
ten about a card-dealer, but there wasn’t any dope angle at all. It
crossed my mind once or twice that that would be dramatic as
hell, but I didn’t know anything about it. I thought it would be
better to lay off if you don’t know, and I didn’t see how you’d go
about finding out about something like that deliberately, so I
dropped it. Somehow I didn’t fit it in. You see. I’d sent the book
to the agent, and the agent said she liked it and all that, but it
needed a peg, it didn’t seem to be hung on anything. But it’s real
curious when I think of it now how obvious a thing is you don’t
see it. I mean, I was thinking about what to hang this book on,
and I was hanging with these guys by that time. Well, one of these
guys is a guy I know a long time — a guy done a lot of time, just a
Polish guy used to drink a lot, that’s all — and he said, “Let’s go
out for a beer,” so we go down on Madison Street. And it was
late, I remember it was about two in the morning and I wanted to
get in — ^it was raining — and he said, “Well, I just live across the
street,” so we ducked, you know, through doors, up, around, up —
and first thing I see this guy standing behind the curtain, I see his
arm swinging, but I was so full of beer I didn’t make anything too
clear about it. It didn’t dawn on me then, but it bothered me that
somebody should be there swinging his arm up and down, you

WRITEBS AT WORK

212

know, and somebody said, “Jack is having trouble,” or something
like that.

I was sort of bothered — I didn’t quite know — and then a bunch
of them come over, and I had a hell of a time putting that situa-
tion together. I didn’t get it; they would come in and out with
little cigar boxe; under their arms, and a guy would say to me,
"We’re just having breakfast, would you like some breakfast?’’
and I’d say, “No, I guess I had breakfast.” So he said, “You want
to see how it’s done?” I said, “Hell no, I don’t want to see how it’s
done.” I felt — ^well, I have an aversion to needles, anyway; I had
it in the Army — ^but I felt, you know, if you want to do it, that’s
your business. I mean, if a guy goes into the can with a cigar box
under his arm, I don’t want no part of that, I don’t want to see it.

Well, then I see that Jack is on junic, but he says with him it
don’t make any difference, he can knock it off any time, y6u know?
Just happens to be one of these guys it don’t get the better of. So
I said, “Well, he’s lucky, I guess he knows what he’s doing.” Well,
I’d go over there. I’d stop and buy, you know, a few bottles of beer
or something like that — I mean there was never anything to eat or
drink in the joint. That bothered me — ^maybe one can of beans on
the shelf — ^people that don’t eat and don’t drink. So I’d bring up
half a dozen bottles of beer or something, and nobody’d want
a beer. I didn’t get it. There’d never be anything to eat, so I’d say,
“Let’s go down and get something to eat” So a girl comes down
with me and I was going to the butcher shop — ^get some meat and
potatoes — ^she went to the bakery and got chocolate rolls, sweet
rolls, rolls with sugar on them. I say, “Jesus, that’s desert.” I said,
"What the hell, don’t you people eatf" And she just says, "Got a
sweet tooth.”

Well, it got plain enough. Sometimes it made me mad — I always
thought I was getting fooled, see. I mean, these guys would come

on with, "Lemme have a you know, hit you for a few bucks,

try you out, and I’d come up; I was a fairly good mark, not too
good a mark. So this one guy says, “You know what I do. Sure I
hit it a little for kicks, but when it starts getting the better of me,
that’s all.” You know the kind of guy, just naturally strong. I mean,
I believed him. Then his wife calls up: “Jack is sick.” So I said,
“Why don’t you get a doctor?” And she said, “Well, he can’t
exactly get a doctor,” and, “Why don’t they come by and get you
in a cab because he wants his own doctor”— or something. So two

NELSON ALGREN 213

of these goofs come by in a cab and we go up north, in a hotel,
out, got nine bucks,*up and down, around a corner, ducking up
and down, then back to Jack, and poor son of a bitch, he come out
and he was pawling. This was the strong guy — ^he was crying and
just pouring sweat. I guess he lost about fifteen pounds that day.
He came out with a real sheepish look, like “Well, you know, it
happens to everybody.” So I felt a little contemptuous of him.
Then these other people had come in, and I had different reactions
with one or two of them, like this one guy I used in — ^well, he
wasn’t Frankie Machine, but when I think of him I think of this
guy. He had a pushed-in kind of mug. I felt much more sym-
pathetic towards him because — ^see, Jack was on it, but he was for
it, too; 1 mean, he really wanted it to be that way — ^but this guy
was on it, but he didn’t want to be. He was against it. There was a
girl there, too, who was like that, never should’ve been on it. So the
swindle got faster and faster. I had an ideal place for them to
come up and fix, so I didn’t think anything of it. They’d just
come up and fix, and that was it. I got along with them pretty
good — ^but it took me a remarkably long time to make any connec-
tion between that and the book. I didn’t want to go over to their
place because it took time from the book; I felt I shouldn’t have
been goofing off like that. But I enjoyed going over there. We’d
sit around and they’d always have music; they didn’t always go
right for the needle, you know, a lot of times they didn’t have it.
Then I began to feel very dimly that maybe there was something
there usable. I thought about it very — timidly, and finally I said to
the agent, “You think that, uh — do you think it’s too sensational?”
She said, “No, use it.” She insisted that I use it, so I hung it on
there; I hung it on there without really knowing a great deal about
it. It was an afterthought. I got the mood of the thing, but I didn’t
have much time to, you know, do it thoroughly. I know a little bit
more about it now, but what I learned, I learned after the book
came out.

Interviewers: Did you ever feel that you should try heroin, in
connection with writing a book about users?

Alcren: No. No. I think you can do a thing like that best from
a detached position.

Interviewers: Were you ever put down by any of these people
as an eavesdropper?

Alcren: No, they were mostly amused by it. Oh, they thought it

WRITERS AT WORK

214

was a pretty funny way to make a living, but — ^well, one time, after
the book came out, I was sitting in this place, and there were a
bouple of junkies sitting there, and this one guy was real proud of
the book; he was trying to get this other guy to read^jit, and finally
the other guy said he had read it, but he said, “You know it ain’t
so, it ain’t Ijke that.’’ There’s a part in the book ‘where this guy
takes a shot, and then he’s talking for about four pages. This guy
says, “You know it ain’t like that, a guy takes a fix and he goes on
the nod, I mean, you know that.” And the other guy says, “Well,
on the other hand, if he really knew what he was talking about,
he couldn’t write the book, he’d be oAt in the can.” So the other
guy says, “Well, if you mean, is it all right for squares, sure, it’s
all right for squares.” So, I mean, you have to compromise. But the
book was somehow incidental to my relationship with them, inas-
much as they always had some hassle going on, and — well, this
needle thing wasn’t always up front, you know. I mean, these were
people you just went to hear a band with. It was only now and
then it’d come to you — like it might suddenly occur to you that
one of your friends is crippled or something — it would come
to you that the guy’s on stuff. But it didn’t stay with you very
much.

I.VTERViEWERS; Were you conscious of having a model for ZoshP

Alghen: No, no, I think that was kind of an invented thing. One
of those things you pick up in the papers — sometimes there’s a
story about a woman chasing the old man around with a mattress-
board all night — that sort of thing. I get a lot of things from the
papers.

Interviewers: Do you ever plot a thing out mechanically?

Alchen; I did it with this last book, A Walk on the Wild Side,
but that was the first time I tried it. Up to now, I’d just go along
with the story and then sort of prop it up — plots that don’t really
stand up, but now in this last one . . . Whether the book itself
stands up as a literary thing I don’t know — ^but I was surpri^d
when I went through it that I’d contrived better because the plot
dovetailed and that was the first time I was able to do that. 'This
Golden Arm thing is really very creaky as far as plot goes, it’s
more of a cowboy-and-Indian thing, a cops-and-robbers thing.

Interviewers: Do you write in drafts?

Algren: Yes, but each draft gets a little longer. I don’t try to
write the whole thing in one draft.

NELSON ALGBEN 215

Intebviewers: How much do you usually write before you
begin to rewrite?

Algren: Very little, I dunno, maybe five pages. I’ve always
figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just
to keep making it longer and longer until something happens —
you know, until it finds its own plot — ^because you can’t outline
and then fit the'thing into it. I suppose it’s a slow way of working.

Interviewers: Do you think of any particular writers as having
influenced your style, or approach?

Algren: Well, I used to like Stephen Crane a lot and, it goes
without saying, Dostoevski — that’s the only Russian I’ve ever re-
read. No, that ain’t all, there’s Kuprin.

Interviewers: How about American writers?

Algren: Well, Hemingway is pretty hard not to write like.

Interviewers: Do you think you write like that?

Algren: No, but you get the feeling from it — the feeling of
economy.

Interviewers: How about Farrell?

Algren: Well, I don’t feel he’s a good writer. Since Studs Loni-
gan, I don’t know of anything of his that’s new or fresh or well
written. Frankly, I just don’t see him. I missed Farrell, let’s put it
that way.

Interviewers: Some of the reviews have linked you and Farrell.

Algren: I don’t think he’s a writer, really. He’s too journalistic
for my taste. I don’t get anything besides a social study, and not
always well told, either. He ha.s the same lack that much lesser-
known writers have. He hits me the same way as, say ... a guy
like Hal Ellson. Do you know him? Well, he’s a New York writer
who does this gang stuff. He’s written some very good books, but
they’re just straight case studies, you know what I mean?

Inter\tewer.s: How about Horace McCoy?

Algren: No, no. I didn’t mean to put Farrell down there. No,
Farrell, I think, is a real earnest guy — ^but I mention this Ellson
bAause Ellson does the same thing. But, I mean, there’s some-
thing awfully big left out. It isn’t enough to do just a case study,
something stenographic. Farrell is stenographic, and he isn’t even
a real good stenographer. He’s too sloppy. In his essays he com-
pares himself with Dreiser — but I don’t think he’s in Dreiser’s
league. He’s as bad a writer as Dreiser — but he doesn’t have the
compassion that makes Dreiser’s bad writing important.

WRITERS AT WORK

216

Interviewers: Do you have a feeling of , camaraderie, or soli-
darity with any contemporary writers?

Algren: No, I couldn't say so. I don’t know many writers.

Interviewers: How do you avoid it?

Algren: Well, I dunno, but I do have the feeling that other
writers can’t help you with writing. I’ve gone to Vriters’ confer-
ences and writers’ sessions and writers’ clinics, and the more I see
of them, the more I’m sure it’s the wrong direction. It isn’t the
place where you learn to write. I’ve always felt strongly that a
writer shouldn’t be engaged with other writers, or with people
who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the
farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are
to sources. I mean, a writer doesn’t really live, he observes.

Interviewers: Didn’t Simone de Beauvoir dedicate a book to
you?

Algren: Yeah, I showed her around Chicago. I showed her the
electric chair and everything.

Interviewers: Do you vote? Locally, there around Gary?

Algren; No. No, I don’t.

Interviewers: Still you do frequently get involved in these
issues, like the Rosenbergs, and so on.

Algren; Yes, that’s true.

Interviewers: What do your publishers think of that?

Algren: Well, they don’t exactly give me any medals for
caution.

Interviewers: Do you think there’s been any sort of tradition
of isolation of the writer in America, as compared to Europe?

Algren: We don’t have any tradition at all that I know of. I
don’t think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it’s
more than geographically he just is isolated, unless he happens to
live in New York City. But I don’t suppose there’s a small town
around the country that doesn’t have a writer. The thing is that
here you get to be a writer differently. I mean, a writer like vSarffe
decides, like any professional man, when he’s fifteen, sixteen years
old, that instead of being a doctor, he’s going to be a writer. And
he absorbs the French tradition and proceeds from there. Well,
here you get to be a writer when there’s absolutely nothing else
you can do. I mean, I don’t know of any writers here who just
started out to be writers, and then became writers. They just
happen to fall into it.

NELSON ALGREN

217

Interviewers: Ho^ did you fall into it?

Algren: Well, I fell into it when I got out of a school of jour-
nalism in '31 in the middle of the depression. I had a little card
that entitlecVme to a job because I’d gone to this school of jour-
nalism, you see. I was just supposed to present this card to the
editor. I didn'^know whether I wanted to be a sports columnist,
a foreign correspondent, or what; I was willing to take what was
open. Only, of course, it wasn’t. Things were pretty tight. Small
towns would send you to big cities, and big cities would send you
to small towns; it was a big hitchhiking time, so I wound up in
New Orleans selling coffee — one of these door-to-door deals — and
one of the guys on this crew said we ought to get out of there
because he had a packing shed in the Rio Grande Valley. So we
bummed down to the Rio Grande. Well, he didn’t have a packing
shed, he knew somebody who had one — one of those things, you
know — ^but what he did do, he promoted a Sinclair gasoline sta-
tion down there. It was a farce, of course, it was an abandoned
station in the middle of nowhere; I mean, there was no chance of
selling gas or anything like that, but I suppose it looked good for
the Sinclair agent to write up to Dallas and say he had a couple
guys rehabilitating the place. There was nothing to the station, it
didn’t even have any windows. But we had to dig pits for the gas,
and then one day the Sinclair guy comes up with a hundred
gallons of gas and wanted somebody to take legal responsibility
for it. So my partner handv me the pencil and says, “Well, you
can write better than I can, you been to school,” and I was sort of
proud of that, so I signed for it.

Then my partner had the idea that I should stay there and take
care of the station, just keep up a front, you know, in case the
Sinclair guy came around, and he’d go out — ^he had an old Stude-
baker — and buy up produce from the Mexican farmers very
cheap, and bring it back and we’d sell it at the station — ^tum the
s&tion into a produce stand. I mean, we were so far out on this
highway that the agent couldn’t really check on us — ^we were
way out; there were deer and wild hogs and everything out there
— and in three weeks we’d be rich. That was his idea. But the
only thing he brought back was black-eyed peas. He paid about
two dollars for a load of black-eyed peas — ^well, that was like buy-
ing a load of cactus — ^but he wouldn’t admit he’d made a mistake.
So, he went around to the big Piggly-Wiggly store and they said

WRITERS AT WORK

218

they’d take some of the peas if they were ^helled. So he set me
to shelling the peas. I shelled those damn peas till I was nearly
blind. In the meantime, he’d left town, out to promote something
else.

Then one day he showed up with another guy, in a much better-
looking car — he’d left the old Studebaker there Ut the station —
and I saw them out there by the pit fooling around with some
sort of contraption, but it didn’t d^wn on me, and then it turned
out they were siphoning the gas into this guy’s car. Well, they left
town before I knew what was happening. When I caught on I
was being swindled, of course, I was very indignant about it, and
I wrote letters that took in the whole South. I gave the whole
Confederacy hell. Oh, it was nowhere, just nowhere, nowhere. So
I wrote a couple letters like that — and I was very serious at the
time, and some of that got into the letters. Ultimately, I got out
of there. I poured a lot of water into the empty tank, but I felt
like a fugitive because I didn’t account to the Sinclair guy. It was
a terrible farce, but later when I got home — I don’t know how
much later — I read the letters again, and there was a story in
them, all right. So I rewrote it and Story Magazine published it,
and I was off. But that’s what I mean by “falling into it.” Because
I was really trying to become a big oil man.

Interviewers: Have you consciously tried to develop a style?

Alcren: Well, I haven’t consciously tried to develop it. The
only thing I’ve consciously tried to do was put myself in a position
to hear the people I wanted to hear talk talk. I used the police
line-up for I don’t know how many years. But that was accidental
too, like that junky deal — ^you don’t exactly seek it out, you’re
there and it dawns on you. I got a newspaper man to loan me his
card, but that was only good for one night. But then I finally got
rolled. I didn’t get myself deliberately rolled; I was just over on
the South Side and got rolled. But they gave me a card, you know,
to look for the guys in the line-up, and I used that card for soifie-
thing like seven years. They finally stopped me — the card got
ragged as hell, pasted here and there, you. couldn’t read it — the
detective at the door stopped me and said, “What happened, you
mean you’re still looking for the guy?” This was like seven years
later, and I said, “Hell yes, I lost fourteen dollars,” so he let me
go ahead.

Interviewers: Do you think, then, that you’re more interested

NELSON ALCREN 219

in idiom than in ide^P And isn’t that generally characteristic of
American writers?

Algren: That’s cutting it pretty close, all right I think of a
tragic exan^ilie; Dick Wright. I think he made ... a very bad mis-
take. I mean, he writes out of passion, out of his belly; but he
won’t admit this, you see. He’s trying to write as an intellectual,
which he isn’t basically; but he’s trying his best to write like a
Frenchman. Of course, it isn’t strictly an American-European dis-
tinction, the belly and the head; you find the same distinction here.
A book like Ralph Ellison’s, for example, or Peter Matthiessen’s,
stays better with me than the opposite thing, a book like Saul
Bellow’s. Bellow’s is a book done with great skill and great con-
trol, but there isn’t much fire. J depend more on the stomach. 1
always think of writing as a physical thing. I’m not trying to
generalize, it just happens to be that way with me.

Interviewers; Can you relate The Man with the Golden Arm
to an idea?

Alcren: No, unless a feeling can be an idea. 1 just had an
over-all feeling, I didn’t have any particular theory about what I
ought to do. Living in a very dense area, you’re conscious of how
the people underneath live, and you have a certain feeling towards
them — so much so that you’d rather live among them than with
the business classes. In a historical sense, it might be related to an
idea, but you write out of — well, I wouldn’t call it indignation, but
a kind of irritability that these people on top should be so con-
tented, so absolutely unaware of these other people, and so sure
that their values are the right ones I mean, there’s a certain satis-
faction in recording the people underneath, whose values are as
sound as theirs, and a lot funnier, and a lot truer in a way. There’s
a certain over-all satisfaction in kind of scooping up a shovelful of
these people and dumping them in somebody’s parlour.

Interviewers: Were you trying to dramatize a social problem?

%LGREN: Well, there’s always something wrong in any society.
I think it would be a mistake to aim at any solution, you know;
I mean, the most you can do is — ^well, if any writer can catch the
routine lives of people just living in that kind of ring of fire to
show how you can’t go out of a certain neighbourhood if you’re
addicted, or for other reasons, that you can’t be legitimate, but
that within the limitation you can succeed in making a life that is
routine — with human values that seem to be a little more real, a

WRITERS AT WORK

220

little more intense, and human, than with pepple who are freer to
come and go — if somebody could write a book about the routine
of these circumscribed people, just their everyday life, without
any big scenes, without any violence, or cops breakii g in, and so
on, just day-to-day life — ^like maybe the woman is hustling and
makes a few bucks, and they get a little H jus! to keep from
getting sick, and go to bed, and get up — ^just an absolutely prosaic
life without any particular drama tu it in their eyes — if you could
just do that straight, without anybody getting arrested — there's
always a little danger of that, of course — ^but to have it just the
way these thousands of people live, very quiet, commonplace
routine . . . well, you’d have an awfully good book.

Ioterviewers: On the point of style again, you seem to favour
phrases, almost more than sentences.

Algren: I always thought my sentences were pretty good. But I
do depend on phrases quite a bit.

Interview'ers: Do you try to write a poetic prose?

Algren: No. No, I’m not writing it, but so many people say
things poetically, they say it for you in a way you never could.
Some guy just coming out of jail might say, “I did it from bell to
bell,” or like the seventeen-year-old junkie, when the judge asked
him what he did all day, he said, “Well, I find myself a doorway
to lean against, and I take a fix, and then I lean, I just lean and
dream.” They always say things like that.

Interviewers: What do you think of Faulkner?

Algren: Well, I can get lost in him awful easy. But he’s
powerful.

Interviewers: It’s interesting that Hemingway once said that
Faulkner and you were the two best writers in America.

Algren: Yeah, I remember when he said that. He said, “After
Faulkner ...” I was very hurt.

Interviewers: You said that the plot of The Man with the
Golden Arm was “creaky.” How much emphasis are you going \o
put on plot in your future writing?

Algren: Well, you have to prop the book up somehow.
You’ve got to frame it, or otherwise it becomes just a series of
episodes.

Interviewers: You gave more attention to plot in this book
you’ve just finished.

NELSON ALGREN

221

Algben: This one^I plotted a great deal more than any other. In
the first place because it’s more of a contrived book. I’m trying to
write a reader’s book, more than my own book. When you’re
writing yovf own book, you don’t have to plot; it’s just when you
write for me reader. And since I’m dealing with the past, the
tliirties, I ha’9e to contrive, whereas, with a living situation, I
wouldn’t have to.

Interviewers: Do you think that this one came off as well as
The Man with the Golden Arm?

Alcren: Mechanically and, I think, technically, it's done more
carefully, and probably reads better than previous books.

Interviewers: You make this distinction between a “reader’s
book” and a book for yourself. What do you think the difference
is?

Alcren; It’s the difference between writing by yourself and
writing on a stage. I mean, if the book were your own, you’d be
satisfied just to have the guy walk down the sidewalk and fall on
his head. In a reader’s book, you’d have him turn a double somer-
sault. You’re more inclined to clown, I think, in a reader’s book.
You’ve got one ear to the audience for yaks. It’s just an obligation
you have to fulfil.

Interviewers: Obligation to whom?

Alcren: Well, you’re talking economics now. I mean, the way
I’ve operated with publishers is that I live on the future. I take
as much money as I can get for as long as I can get it, you know,
a year or two years, and by the end of that time your credit begins
to have holes in it, and — well, you have to come up. After all,
they’re businessmen. Of course, you can get diverted from a book
you want to write. I’ve got a book about Chicago on the West
Side — I did a hundred pages in a year, and I still figure I need
three years on it — but I was under contract for this other one, so
it took precedence. I didn’t want to contract for the first one,
Because I just wanted to go along as far as I could on it
without having any pressure on me. The one I contracted for
is the one I finished, and now I’m going back to the one I want
to do.

Interviewers: Did you enjoy writing The Man with the Golden
Arm more than you did this last one?

Alcren: Well, it seemed more important. I wouldn’t say I en-

WRITERS AT WORK

222

joyed it more, because in a way this was a much easier book to do.
The lumber is all cut for you. The timber and the dimensions are
all there, you know you’re going to write a four-hundred-page
book; and in that way your problems are solved, yo{.i’re limited.
Whereas, with a book like that Man with the Golden Arm, you
cut your own timber, and you dent know where ybu’re building,
you don’t have any plan or anything.

Interviewers: Do you find that you take more care with a
thing like that?

Alcren: No, I always take great care. I think I’m very careful,
maybe too careful. You can get too fussy. I do find myself getting
bogged down wondering whether I should use a colon or a semi-
colon, and so on, and I keep trying each one out. I guess you can
overdo that.

Interviewers: Do you think that writing a book out of eco-
nomic obligation could affect your other work?

Alcren: No, it won’t have anything to do with that at all. One
is a matter of living and reacting from day to day, whereas the
book I just finished could be written anywhere there’s a type-
writer.

Interviewers: Do you think your writing improves?

Alcren: I think technically it does. I reread my first book, and
found it — oh, you know, “poetic,” in the worst sense.

Interviewers: Do you feel that any critics have influenced your
work?

Alcren: None could have, because I don’t read them. I doubt
anyone does, except other critics. It seems like a sealed-off field
with its own lieutenants, pretty much preoccupied with its own
intrigues. I got a glimpse into the uses of a certain kind of criti-
cism this past summer at a writers’ conference — ^into how the avo-
cation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into
a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.
I saw how it was possible to gain a chair of literature on no qualifi-
cation other than persistence in nipping the heels of Hemingway,
Faulkner, and Steinbeck. I know, of course, that there are true
critics, one or two. For the rest all I can say is, “Deal around
me.

Interviewers: How about this movie. The Man with the
Golden Arm?

Alcren: Yeah.

NELSON ALCREN

223

Interviewers: Vid you have anything to do with the
script?

/o^gren: No. No, I didn’t last long. J went out there for a thou-
sand a and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday.
The guy Aat hired me was out of town Tuesday.

Alston Anderson
Terry Southern

Angus Wilson

Angus Wilson was bom at Bexhill, in Sussex, on August 11, 1903.
After attending Westminster School, he studied medieval history
at Merton College, Oxford. His academic career was followed by
a succession of employments which included tutoring, secretarial
work, catering, social organizing, and running a restaurant. In
1907 he took a post with the British Museum, and after spending
the war years employed at the Foreign Office, he returned to the
position of deputy superintendent of the Reading Room. Late in
the war he had suffered a nervous breakdown and, as a therapeutic
measure, had begun to write short stories. It was a practice he
continued after the war on week-ends from his Museum work. In
1909 the stories were pubhshed in a voliune called The Wrong
Set. The collection attracted immediate attention for its savage
characterizations of the contemporary world — marked by Wilson’s
mockery of hypocrisy and sham. A second collection. Such Darling
Dodos, followed in 1900. In 1902, with the appearance of his first
novel. Hemlock and After, Wilson’s reputation was established as
one of the most promising of the postwar British novelists. Evelyn
Waugh, to whom Wilson has often been compared for his biting
contempt for corruption in society, described Hemlock and After
as “a singularly rich, compact and intricate artifact ... a thing to
fejoice over . . ."

Wilson’s second novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, was published in
1906. Cyril Connolly reported in the Sunday Times mat it was a
novel “such as we have not seen since Huxley’s Point Counter
Point" It was as well received in the United States. Charles Rolo
of the Atlantic Monthly was moved to describe the author as
a "... writer with unusual resources of wit and intelligence — a
writer, moreover, who is virtually incapable of producing a duU

page.”

Wilson’s works also include an examination of Zola’s novels
(£mile Zola, 1902), a satiric insight into the twenties entitled For
Whom the Cloche Tolls (1904), and a third volume of short stories
—A Bit of the Map (1907).

WilSbn resigned from his Museum post in 1905. He divides his
time between London and a Suffolk cottage, where his hobby is
gardening.

Angus Wilson

A London apartment in Dolphin Square, just downriver from
Chelsea. Dolphin Square — and this came as something of a sur-
prise— is a huge block of service apartments, with restaurant
(where we ate lunch), indoor swimming pool, shops, bars, etc. —
the layout and dicor of this part strongly reminiscent of an ocean
liner. The apartment itself, on the ground floor and looking out on
the central court, was small, comfortable, tidy, uneccentric; there
were hooks but not great heaps of them; the pictures included a
pair of patriotic prints from the First World War (“the period
fascinates me"). For Wilson it is just a place to stay when he has
to be in London: his real home is a cottage in Suffolk, five miles
from the nearest village (“7 find I hate cities more and more. I
used to need people, but now I can be much more alone"). The
electric fire was on, although the late September day was fine and
quite mild. Wilson explahed that he had just got back from Asia
— Japan (where he had been a guest of honour at the P.E.N. Con-
ference), the Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand — and found Eng-
land cold.

Although one does not think of Wilson as a small man, he is
rather below the average height. His face is mobile but somewhat
plumper than in most of the published photographs, the hair white
at the front shading to grey at the back, the forehead lined, the
myebrows rather prominent, the eyes pale grey and serious — but
not solemn: Wilsons manner has a liveliness and warmth that is
immediately engaging. He talks quickly, confidently yet un-
affectedly, eagerly — obviously enjoying it. The conversation be-
fore and during lunch was mainly about Japan — it had been his
first visit to Asia and he had clearly been impressed — and about
other writers. Now, after lunch, Wilson agrees to talk about him-
self.

227

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228

Interviewer: When did you start writing?^

Wilson: I never wrote anything — except for the school mag:i-
zine — until November 1906. Then I wrote a short story one week-
end— ^“Raspberry Jam” — and followed that up by wri,^ing a short
story every week-end for- twelve weeks. I was then thirty-three.
My writing started as a hobby: that seems a funny word to use—
but, yes, hobby. During the war, when I was working at the
Foreign OflRce, I had a bad nervous breakdown, and after the war
I decided that simply to return to my job at the British Museum
would be too depressing. Writing seemed a good way of diversi-
fying my time. I was living in the country and commuting to
London then and I could only do it at week-ends. That’s why I
started with short stories: this was something I could finish, realize
completely, in a week-end.

Interviewer: Had you never thought of becoming a writer
before that time?

Wilson: No, I never had any intention of becoming a writer. I’d
always thought that far too many things were written, and work-
ing in the Museum convinced me of it. But I showed some of my
stories to Robin Ironside, the painter, and he asked if he could
show them to Cyril Connolly, who took two for Horizon. Then a
friend of mine at Seeker and Warburg said, “Let us have a look
at them,” and they said that if I gave them twelve stories they
would publish them. This was The Wrong Set. They told me there
wasn’t much sale for short stories and so on, but the book was
surprisingly successful both here and in America. After that I
went on writing — reviews, broadcasts, more short stories. The
thing grew and grew, and wlien I came to write Hemlock and
After I had to do it in one of my leaves. 1 did it in four weeks. But
when I wanted to write a play — that was a different matter. I
knew it would take longer to write and that I’d have to revise it,
attend rehearsals, and so on. And I was still a full-time civil ser-
vant at the British Museum. To resolve the conflict I resigned. It
was rather ironic really. When I left school I wanted a perma-
nent job, and I got it at the Museum. Now at the age of forty-two
I no longer wanted a permanent job. It meant giving up my pen-
sion, and that isn’t easy at that age. But so far I haven’t re-
gretted it.

Interviewer: Do you find writing comes easily to you?

Wilson: Yes. I write very easily. I told you Hemlock took four

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229

weeks. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes took four months, and an awful lot
of that time was taken up just with thinking. The play — The Mul-
berry Bush, the only thing I’ve rewritten several times — was dif-
ferent again* My latest book of short stories, A Bit off the Map,
took longer too, and my new novel is proving a bit difficult. But
I'm not undul)^worried. When one starts writing it’s natural for the
stuflF to come rolling off the stocks — ^is that the right image? —
rather easily. And, of course, the fact that it comes harder doesn’t
necessarily mean that it’s worse. When Dickens published his
novels in serial form he always added in his letter to the reader:
“I send you this labour of love.” After Bleak House he couldn’t; it
hadn’t been a labour of love. But the later Dickens novels are cer-
tainly none the worse for that.

iNTERViEWEa: Do you work every day?

Wilson: Goodness, no. I did that when I was a civil servant and
I don’t propose to do so now. But when I’m writing a book I do
work every day.

Interviewer: To a schedule?

WmsoN: Not really. No. I usually work from eight to two, but
if it’s going well I may go on to four. Only if I do I’m extremely
exhausted. In fact, when the book is going well the only thing
that stops me is sheer exhaustion. I wouldn’t like to do what
Elizabeth Bowen once told me she did — write something every
day, whether I was working on a book or not.

Interviewer: Do you usually work on one book at a time?

Wilson: Oh, yes. I’ve never worked on more than one book at
a time, and I don’t think it would be good.

Interviewer: About how many words a day do you write?

Wilson: Oh — between one and two thousand. Sometimes more.
But the average would be one or two thousand.

Interviewer: Longhand, typewriter, or dictation?

Wilson: Longhand. I can’t type. And I’m sure it wouldn’t work
ffir me to dictate, though I did think of it when I was doing the
play; it might help with the dialogue. But the trouble is I'm too
histrionic a person anyway, and even when I’m writing a novel I
act out the scenes.

Interviewer: Aloud?

Wilson: Very often. Especially dialogue.

Interviewer: Do you make notes?

Wilson: Books of them. The gestatory period before I start to

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230

write is very important to me. That’s when I’m persuading myself
of the truth of what I want to say, and I don’t think I could per-
suade my readers unless I’d persuaded myself first

Interviewer; What sort of notes?

Wilson: Oh, notes about the ages of the characters, where they
live, little maps, facts about their lives before the book starts.
Names are very important to me, too. Look at these notes for The
Mulberry Bush, for example. Thei'^ are statements of themes,
like this: “James and Rose are the core of the tradition.” And ques-
tions— I’m always asking myself questions — like “What are Kurt’s
motives here?” I set myself problems and try to find ways out of
them. Then the thing begins to take shape — this note, for example;
“The first act ends in row between Ann and Simon.” Then comes
the first version of the first act. It’s the same with the novels: I
write notes like “But this isn’t what the book is really about. What
it is about is . . . ,” and so on.

Interviewer: Why do you feel the need for so many notes?

Wilson: Two reasons. To convince myself, as I said before.
And to keep a kind of check on myself. Once one starts writing,
the histrionic gifts — the divine passion or whatnot — are liable to
take control and sweep you away. It’s a matter of setting things on
their right course. Then it’s much easier to write as the spirit
moves.

Interviewer; Do you do careful or rapid first drafts?

Wilson: Oh, I only do one draft. I never do any other. I correct
as I go along. And there is very little correction; the changes in
the draft are mainly deletions. Occasionally a new paragraph goes
in. Take the end of Hemlock, for example. It’s rather a Dickens
ending, accounting for all the characters. At the end I found Ron's
mother, Mrs. Wrigley, wasn’t accounted for, so I put in the para-
graph about her. It’s rather like Dickens at the end of Dombey
and Son. After he’d sent the manuscript to his publishers he sent
them a note: “Please put in a paragraph about Diogenes the dog:

something on these lines ” I like to have everyone accounted

for, too.

Interviewer: What is the difference for you between a short
story and a novel?

Wilson: Short stories and plays go together in my mind. You
take a point in time and develop it from there; there is no room for
development backwards. In a novel I also take a point in time, but

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231

feel every room for <^evelopment backwards. All fiction for me is a
kind of magic and trickery — a confidence trick, trying to make
people believe something is true that isn’t. And the novelist, in
particular, is*trying to convince the reader that he is seeing society
as a whole.*

This is why 1 use such a lot of minor characters and subplots, of
course. It isn’t wilful love of subplots for their bwn sake, wilful
Victorianism, but because they enable me to suggest the existence
of a wider society, the ripples of a society outside. And more im-
portant is this thing about fiction as trickery. The natural habit of
any good and critical reader is to disbelieve what you are telling
him and try to escape out of the world you are picturing. Some
novelists try to make the magic work by taking you deep down
inside one person. I try to multiply the worlds I put into the books
— so that, like the ripples of the stone thrown into the brook, you
feel the repercussions going farther and farther out, and at the
same time bringing more in. The reader is more inclined to be-
lieve in Gerald and Ingeborg because someone so different as Mrs.
Salad is affected by them. I’ve always thought this had something
to do with the endings of Shakespeare’s tragedies. An entirely new
lot of people come in — Fortinbras in Hamlet, for example, and it’s
the same with Macbeth and Lear. You believe in the tragedies
more because these others from outside confirm them. The worst
kind of nightmare is the one where you dream you’ve woken up
and it’s still going on. The bird reason for all the characters is
the Proustian one, which seems to me very good, that the strangest
and most unlikely lives are in fact interdependent. This is especi-
ally true in times like our own when the old boundaries and
demarcations are becoming blurred.

Intervieweh: What about short stories?

Wilson: You can’t do this sort of thing with short stories. They
have a kind of immediate ethical text. Many of mine have pun-
nfhg titles. I take a platitude — “the wrong set,” for example: the
point is that no one knows what the wrong set is, and one person’s
wrong set is another’s right set. And you get the pay-off, which is
something I like. A play is rather like this, but has more depth.
And plays and short stories are similar in that both start when all
but the action has finished.

Interviewer: I think you’ve seen what Frank O’Connor said
about Anglo-Saxon Attitudes when he was interviewed for this

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series. He criticizes your “exploitation of eyery known form of
technique in the modem novel" — ^techniques taken, he says, from
the cinema and from Point Counter Point — and the whole modem
tendency to concentrate the action of a novel around the actual
moment of crisis instead of covering a longer period and “demon-
strating the hero in all his phases." Anglo-Saxon AtAtudes, he says,
“would have been a good novel if it had begun twenty years
earlier.” I’m sure you wiU have something to say to this.

Wilson; Yes, indeed. I thought his remarks very curious. He
implies that I’m in the twentieth-century experimental tradition.
It’s very flattering, of course — every known form of technique in
the modem novel” — but I wasn’t aware of using any techniques,
except that the book was concerned with echoes of memory. I
think the reader should be unaware of techniques, though it’s the
critic’s job to see them, of course. O’Connor seems not to have
noticed that the techniques used in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes are not
just flashbacks as in the cinema, nor just episodic as in Point
Counter Point — I’ve recently reread that and can see no shape in
it at all. If you examine the flashbacks in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes —
and they took me a lot of trouble, I may say — you’ll see that it is
an ironic picking up of phrases. Marie H61^ne says, “life consists,
I believe, in accepting one’s duty, and that means often to accept
the second best.” This leads Gerald to remember his courtship of
Ingeborg: he accepted the second best then, and it has ruined
both his life and hers. This is an ironic comment on the cynical
realism of Marie H61^ne. It’s not just cinema, you see, it’s very
carefully planned, though I say it myself.

Interviewer; What about O’Connor’s remark that it should
have started twenty years earlier?

Wilson; If it had started twenty years earlier it would have
been a simply enormous book — a kind of chronicle novel, I sup-
pose; The Story of a Disappointed Man. Where O’Connor goes
wrong is in thinking that I’m concerned at all with the hero &s
such. I’m only concerned with the hero as an illustration of the
inevitability of decline if life is denied. After all, there’s a definite
statement in the book; Gerald’s life goes wrong in two ways — with
the historical fraud, and with his wife and children. And when he
tries to “face the truth” — in the conventional phrase — ^he can do
this in relation to the fraud all right, but he can’t remake his life
with his wife and children. This shows up the platitude of “facing

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233

the truth.” Gerald i^only freed in that he faces the result of his
not having faced the truth — ^he accepts his loneliness. A matter of
theoretical morality can be put right, but this can’t be done where
human beings are involved.

Interviewer: Other people besides O’Connor have commented
on certain tecHhical similarities between your work and Huxley’s.
I gather you don’t feel you owe him any particular debt?

Wilson: Consciously, of course. I’m in great reaction against
Huxley — and against Virginia Woolf. But I read them a great deal
when young, and what you read in adolescence can go very deep.
I’ve been much more influenced by Dickens, Proust, Zola. And the
ceremony in Hemlock is obviously influenced by that scene in The
Possessed where the poet, who is Turgenev, comes in and makes
a fool of himself. Zola has certainly influenced me a great deal in
the form and shape of my novels. From Proust I get the feeling
about paradox and the truth of improbability — especially the
latter.

Interviewer: Are your characters based on observation?

Wilson: Oh, yes. I don’t see how else you can do it. But not
taken from life. Every character is a mixture of people you’ve
known. Characters come to me — and I think this is behind the
Madeleine business in Proust — ^when people are talking to me. I
feel I have heard this, this tone of voice, in other circumstances.
And, at the risk of seeming rude, I have to hold on to this and
chase it back until it clicks with someone I’ve met before. The
second secretary at the embassy in Bangkok may remind me of
the chemistry assistant at Oxford. And I ask myself, what have
they in common? Out of such mixtures 1 can create characters. All
my life I’ve always known a lot of people. Some say my novels are
narrow, but I really can’t see what they mean. I thought they were
pretty wide myself.

Interviewer: Some people think you -have an unnecessarily
Idfge number of vicious characters.

Wilson: I really don’t know why people find my characters
unpleasant. I believe — perhaps it would be different if I were
religious — ^that life is very difficult for most people and that most
people make a fair job of it. The opportunities for heroism are
limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is some-
times not to be as weak as they’ve been at other times. When
Evelyn Waugh reviewed Hemlock and After he was very perdpi-

WBITERS AT WORK

234

ent about techniques, but described the characters as "young
cad,” “mother’s darling,” and so on — ^terms it would never occur
to me to use. I told him I thought the people he described in those
terms had behaved rather well. Terence — ^the “young cad” — ^is on
the make, certainly, but he behaves rather well in spite of that.
And Eric does half break away from his mother— which is quite
an achievement in the circumstances.

Of course, all my characters are very self-conscious, aware of
what they are doing and what they are like. There’s heroism in
going on at all while knowing how we are made. Simple, na'ive
people I’m impatient of, because they haven’t faced up to the
main responsibility of civilized man — that of facing up to what
he is and to the Freudian motivations of his actions. Most of my
characters have a Calvinist conscience, and this is something
which in itself makes action difficult. The heroism of my people,
again, is in their success in making a relationship with other
human beings, in a humanistic way, and their willingness to
accept some sort of pleasure principle in life as against the gnaw-
ings of a Calvinist conscience and the awareness of Freudian
motivations. These people are fully self-conscious, and the only
ones who are at all evil — apart from Mrs. Curry, who is something
quite different, a kind of embodiment of evil — are those like Marie
H^l^ne and Ingeborg who substitute for self-awareness and self-
criticism a simple way of living, Marie Helene’s hard and practi-
cal, Ingeborg’s soft and cosy. They accept a pattern of behaviour
and morality instead of self-awareness. Characters can be heroic
even though they can squeeze only a minimum of action out of
the situation. That is how I see it, anyway, though I realize some
people might find my characters rather inactive.

Intervifweh: I noticed earlier that you sometimes seem to
speak of your characters as existing out.side the novel — the kind
of thing the Leavises so object to. And Elizabeth Sands makes a
brief appearance in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

W11..SON; Yes, my friends have criticized my putting Elizabeth
Sands in there — “Hugh Walpole,” they say. I told E. M. Forster
this and he said, “Ah yes — but Balzac too, you know.” I’m on
Leavis’s side really, but he always writes as a critic, never as a
creator. And the writer can’t visualize his characters within a
framework, although the creation of a work of art demands put-
ting them within a framework. The use of a character for artistic

ANGUS WILSON

235

creation is one things the author s knowledge of that character is
another. Otherwise you’d remove the element of choice, which is
the essence of the creative act. What if George Eliot had seen
Middlemarch whole, in a lump? There’d be no choice. At some
point she must have imagined what Mr. Gasaubon’s housekeeper
was like and tlecided to leaye her out. It’s not instantaneous
vision, and I don’t think Leavis himself would ex\>ect it to be. Of
course it was self-indulgence to bring Elizabeth Sands into Anglo-
Saxon Attitudes: 1 felt that many people would like Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes better than Hemlock and After — and for the wrong
reasons — and I wanted to show them that the worlds of the two
books were the same.

Interviewer: You think Hemlock and After has been under-
rated?

Wilson: Yes. I think that in the long run Hemlock and After is
a better book than Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, if not so competently
carried out. Hemlock is both a more violent and a more compas-
sionate book. I know this is a sentimental cliche, but I do feel
towards my books very much as a parent must towards his chil-
dren. As soon as someone says, “I did like your short stories, but
I don’t like your novels,” or, “Of course you only really came into
your own with Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” — then immediately I want
to defend all my other books. I feel this especially about Hemlock
and After and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes — one child a bit odd but
exciting, the other competent but not really so interesting. If
people say they like one book and not the other, then I feel they
can’t have understood the one they don’t like.

Interviewer: The publisher’s blurb for your new volume of
short stories, A Bit off the Map, begins: “In an England where
the lines of class and caste are becoming blurred and the tradi-
tional values have lost much of their force, the characters in Angus
Wilson’s new stories seek — sometimes cheerfully, sometimes with
desperation — to get their true bearings on the map of society.”
Wouldn’t this comment apply pretty much to all your books?

Wilson: Yes, I suppose it would. But you’ll realize when they
appear that each of these stories is designed to show a specific
example of such blurrings of the class lines and of the false
answers people provide today to get back some sense of position
in society. These new stories are all satirical of the old philosophies
which have now become fashionable again — neo-Toryism, Colin

WBITERS AT WORK

236

Wilson’s Nietzscheanism, and so on— of , people seeking after
values which now no longer apply.

Interviewer; Do you think of yourself primarily as a satirist?

Wilson: No, I don’t. Satire for me is something riore abstract
— Animal Farm, Erewkon, that sort of thing. I’m 'much more
traditional than that — which is why I was so surjirised at Frank
O’Connor’s puKing me with the experimental writers. I’ve de-
liberately tried to get back to the Dickens tradition. I use irony
as one main approach, perhaps overdoing it. It’s been said that too
much irony is one of the great dangers of the English tradition,
and perhaps I’ve fallen into that trap. I don’t think of Point
Counter Point as satire: it’s comedy of manners — and you could
call my work that. But satire implies an abstract philosophy that
I don’t have; there’s nothing I want to say in the way that Butler
wanted to say something about machines, for example.

Interviewer; In writing about Anglo-Saxon attitudes, then, you
aren’t seeking to change them?

Wn.soN: Oh, no. I don’t think it’s the novelist’s job to give
answers. He’s only concerned with exposing the human situation,
and if his books do good incidentally that’s all well and good. It’s
rather like sermons.

Intervievi'er: Isn’t a sermon intended to do good?

Wilson: Only to the individual, not to society. It’s designed to
touch the heart — and I hope my books touch the heart now and
again.

Interviewer: But you definitely don’t think a novelist should
have a social purpose?

Wilson: I don’t think a writer should have anything. I have
certain social and political views, and I suppose these may appear
in my work. But as a novelist I’m concerned solely with what I’ve
discovered about human emotions. I attack not specific things, but
only people who are set in one way of thinking. The people in my
books who come out well may be more foolish, but they have de-
tained an immediacy towards life, not a set of rules applied to life
in advance.

Interviewer: What do you think, then, of the “angry young
men’’?

Wilson: Of course they don’t really belong together — though
it’s largely their own fault that they have been lumped together.
They thought popular journalism was a good way to propagate

ANGUS WILSON

23^

their ideas, and the popular journalists themselves have naturally
written of them as a group. The only thing I have against them —
while knowing and liking them person^y — ^is the element of
strong self-pity, which I do think is a very ruinous element in art.
Whatever they write about — when Osbome writes about his feel-
ing for the underprivileged, for example — ^you get the feeling that
they are really complaining about the way they Kkve been treated.
And, apart from Colin Wilson, they are so concerned to say that
they won’t be taken in — ^we’ll be honest and not lay claim to any
higher feelings than those we’re quite sure we have — ^that one
sometimes wishes they’d be a bit more hypocritical. After all, if
you think of yourself in that way, you come to think of everyone
else in that way and reduce everything to the level of a com-
mercial traveller talking in a bar, knowing life only too well —
and in fact people are often better than they make themselves
out to be. Their point of view is lago’s, and lago disguised a very
black heart — I don’t accuse the angry young men of being black-
hearted, of course — ^beneath his guise of a cynical plain man’s
point of view. It isn’t quite good enough for serious artists.

Interviewer: What do you feel about writing for the stage?
Do you feel the novelist has anything to learn from it?

Wilson: Yes. One learns a great deal about what can be
omitted, even from a novel, because the play is such a compact
form. The best modern plays — ^by Tennessee Williams, John
Osborne, and so on — ^have tremendous and wonderful power. But
the play of ideas — Ibsen and so on — is a little too much at a dis-
count these days.

Interviewer: Do you intend to write for the stage again?

Wilson: Certainly. I want to try to produce more purely
theatrical emotion. And I hope to do that and still try for the ideas
and the wit of dialogue that I think I got in The Mulberry Bush,
which seemed a little untheatrical to some people. I want to get
more theatrical power, not to write like Williams, but to bring
back something of the Ibsen and Shaw tradition. '

Interviewer: What about the cinema?

Wilson: I should be only too pleased if my books were turned
into films, but 1 can’t imagine myself writing original film scripts
— ^I don’t know the necessary techniques, and I rarely even go to
the cinema these days. When writing a play you have to realize
that the final production won’t be only your own work. You have

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238

to co-operate with the producer, the actors,i.and so on. And I’m
prepared for that. But in the cinema the writer is quite anony-
mous, and 1 feel — ^for good reasons or bad — ^that I must be respon-
sible for what I’ve written and collect the praise or blame for it.
Once a book is done I don’t care what other people do with it. The
Mulberry Bush is being televised soon, and the producer rang me
up to say it would have to be cut to ninety minutes. I told him to
go ahead and do what he wanted: he knows television and I don’t.
But I couldn’t have made a sketch of The Mulberry Bush and let
it be played about with, if you see the difference.

Interviewer: What plans do you have for the future?

Wilson: I’m in the course of writing another novel. And, as I’ve
just said, I want to do another play. Then I want to do a book of
literary essays on nineteenth-century writers, about whom I have
a lot to say that I think hasn’t been said. And I want to do a book
— ^not fiction — about the home front during the 1914 war. Of all
the terrible things that have happened in my lifetime 1 still think
of the trench warfare of the 1914 war as the worst. And the home
front was in the strange position of being concerned and yet un-
concerned at the same time. The predicament of these people
seems likely to connect closely with the predicament of many of
the characters in my novels: Bernard Sands and Gerald Middle-
ton, for example, are both concerned with tragedy yet become
observers of it by their withdrawal.

Interviewer: Would you say something more about your new
novel?

Wilson: I’m sorry, but I don’t like to talk about my books in
advance. It isn’t just that any short account of a novel seems
ridiculous by the side of the real thing. But, as I’ve said before,
fiction writing is a kind of magic, and I don’t care to talk about a
novel I’m doing because if I communicate the magic spell, even
in an abbreviated form, it loses its force for me. And so many
people have talked out to me books they would otherwise have
written. Once you have talked, the act of communication has been
made.

Michael Millgate

William Styron

William Styron was born in 1905 in Newport News, Virginia, a
section which provided the locale for his first novel. Lie Down in
Darkness. He studied in William Blackburn's writing class at
Duke University, and later in Hiram Haydn’s course at New
York’s New School. Under Haydn’s guidance, Styron finished Lie
Down in Darkness, a first novel which appeared in 1901 and won
him immediate standing among the best of contemporary writers.
The critic John W. Aldridge wrote: “It would be a disservice to
Styron, and worse than meaningless in these times, to say that he
has produced a work of genius . . . yet one can say that he has pro-
duced a first novel containing some of the elements of greatness,
one with which the work of no other young writer of twenty-five
cjpn be compared.”

In 1900, Styron was recalled to the Marines, and the experience
gave him the background for a brilliant novella-length story called
^The Long March.” Originally published in the first issue of the
literary magazine Discovery, the story was in 1906 published as a
book.

For Lie Down in Darkness Styron won the 1902 Prix de Rome
for Literature. He was married in Rome, and has since returned
with his wife to Roxbury, Connecticut, where he is at work on a
novel about Americans in Europe^

William Styron

William Styron was interviewed in Paris, in early autumn, at
Patricks, a cafS on the Boulevard Montparnasse which has little
to distinguish it from its neighbours — the D6me, the Rotonde, Le
Chapelain — except a faintly better brand of cofee. Across the
Boulevard from the cafi and its sidewalk tables, a red poster por-
trays a skeletal family. They are behind bars, and the caption
re^: take your vacation in happy russu. The lower part of the
poster has been ripped and scarred and plastered with stickers
shouting; LES Americans en ameriqueI u.s. go home! An adjoin-
ing poster advertises carbonated water. perrierI It sings, l’eau
Qui FAIT pschtitI The sun reflects strongly off their vivid colours,
and Styron, shading his eyes, peers down into his coffee. He is a
young man of good appearance, though not this afternoon; he is a
little paler than is healthy in this quiet hour when the denizens of
the quarter lie hiding, their weak night eyes insulted by the light.

Interviewers: You were about to tell us when you started to
write.

Styron: What? Oh, yes. Write. I figure I must have been about
thirteen. I wrote an imitation Conrad thing, "Typhoon and the
Tor Bay" it was called, you know, a ship's hold swarming with
crazy Chinks. 1 think I had some sharks in there too. I gave it the
fifll treatment.

Interviewers: And how did you happen to start? That is, why
did you want to write?

Styron: I wish I knew. I wanted to express myself, I guess. But
after "Typhoon and the Tor Bay” I di^’t give writing another
thought until I went to Duke University and landed in a creative
writing course under William Blackburn. He was the one who got
me started.

241

WRITERS AT WORK

242

Interviewers: What value has the creative writing course tor
young writers?

Styron: It gives them a start, I suppose. But it can be an awful
waste of time. Look at those people who go back yecr after year
to summer writers' conferences, you get so you can pick them out
a mile away. A writing course can only give you a 'start, and help
a little. It can't teach writing. The professor should weed out the
good from the bad, cull them like a fanner, and not encourage the
ones who haven't got something. At one school I know in New
York which has a lot of writing courses there are a couple of
teachers who moon in the most disgusting way over the poorest,
most talentless writers, giving false hope where there shouldn't
be any hope at all. Regularly they put out dreary little anthologies,
the quality of which would chill your blood. It's a ruinous busi-
ness, a waste of paper and time, and such teachers should be
abolished.

Interviewers; 'The average teacher can’t teach anything about
technique or style?

Styron; Well, he can teach you something in matters of tech-
nique. You know — don’t tell a story from two points of view and
that sort of thing. But I don’t think even the most conscientious
and astute teachers can teach anything about style. Style comes
only after long, hard practice and writing.

Interviewers: Do you enjoy writing?

Styron: I certainly don’t. I get a fine warm feeling when
I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by
the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is
heU.

Interviewers: How many pages do you turn out each day?

Styron; When I’m writing steadily — that is, when I’m involved
in a project which I’m really interested in, one of those rare pieces
which has a foreseeable end — I average two-and-a-half or three
pages a day, longhand on yellow sheets. I spend about five hours
at it, of which very little is spent actually writing. I try to get a
feeling of what’s going on in the story before I put it down on
paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long,
fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work
at hand. I can’t turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could.
I seem tc have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph —
each sentence, even — as I go along.

WILLIAM STYRON 243

Interviewebs: what time of the day do you find best for

working?

Styron: The afternoon. I like to stay up late at night and get
drunk and sleep late. 1 wish 1 could break the habit but I can’t.
The aftem&on is the only time I have left and I try to use it to
the best advanthge, with a hangover.

Interviewers: Do you use a notebook?

Styron: No, I don’t feel the need for it. I’ve tried, but it does
no good, since I’ve never used what I’ve written down. I think the
use of a notebook depends upon the individual.

Interviewers: Do you find you need seclusion?

Styron: I find it’s difficult to write in complete isolation. I think
it would be hard for me on a South Sea island or in the Maine
woods. I like company and entertainment, people around. The
actual process of writing, though, demands complete, noiseless
privacy, without even music; a baby howling two blocks away
will drive me nuts.

Interviewers; Does your emotional state have any bearing on
your work?

Styron: I guess like evefybody I’m emotionally fouled up most
of the time, but I find I do better when I’m relatively placid. It’s
hard to say, though. If writers had to wait until their precious
psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing
done. Actually — though I don’t take advantage of the fact as
much as I should — I fimJ that I’m simply the happiest, the
placidest, when I’m writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is
the final answer. When I’m writing I find it’s the only time that
I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not
going too well. It’s fine therapy for people who are perpetually
scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — ^for jittery
people. Besides, I’ve discovered that when I’m not writing I’m
prone to developing certain nervous tics, and hypochondria.
\\Aiting alleviates those quite a bit. I think I resist change more
than most people. I dislike travelling, like to stay settled. When I
first came to Paris all I could think about was going home, home
to the old James River. One of these days I expect to inherit a
peanut farm. Co back home and farm them old peanuts and be
real old Southern whisky gentry.

Interviewers: Your novel was linked to the Southern school
of fiction. Do you think the critics were justified in doing this?

WRITERS AT WORK

244

Styron: No, (rankly, I don’t consider in the Southern

school, whatever that is. Lie Down in Darkness, or most of it, was
set in the South, but I don’t care if I never write about the South
again, really. Only certain things in the book ar^ particularly
Southern. I used leitmotivs — the Negroes, for exampli; — that run
throughout the book, but I would like to believe Vhat my people
would have behaved the way they did anywhere. The girl, Pey-
ton, for instance, didn’t have to ct»me from Virginia. She would
have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she
came from. Critics are always linking writers to "schools.” If they
couldn’t link people to schools, they’d die. When what they con-
descendingly call "a genuinely fresh talent” arrives on the scene,
the critics rarely try to point out what makes him fresh or genuine
but concentrate instead on how he behaves in accordance with
their preconceived notion of what school he belongs to.

Interviewers: You don’t find that it’s true of most of the so-
called Southern novels that the reactions of their characters are
universal?

Styron: Look, I don’t mean to repudiate my Southern back-
ground completely, but I don’t believe that the South alone pro-
duces “universal” literature. That universal quality comes far
more from a single writer’s mind and his individual spirit than
from his background. Faulkner’s a writer of extraordinary stature
more because of the great breadth of his vision than because he
happened to be bom in Mississippi. All you have to do is read one
issue of the Times Book Review to see how much junk comes out
regularly from south of the Mason-Dixon line, along with the
good stuff. I have to admit, though, that the South has a definite
literary tradition, which is the reason it probably produces a better
quality of writing, proportionately. Perhaps it’s just true that
Faulkner, if he had been bom in, say, Pasadena, might very well
still have had that universal quality of mind, but instead of writing
Light in August he would have gone into television or writfrm
universal ads for Jantzen bathing suits.

Interviewers: Well, why do you think this Southern tradition
exists at all?

Styron: Well, first, there’s that old heritage of Biblical rhetoric
and story-telling. Then the South simply provides such wonderful
material. Take, (or instance, the conflict between the ordered
Protestant tradition, the fundamentalism based on the Old Testa-

WILLIAM STYRON

245

ment, and the twen^eth century — ^movies, cars, television. The
poetic juxtapositions you find in this conflict — a. crazy coloured
preacher howling those tremendously moving verses from Isaiah
40, while riding around in a maroon Packard. It’s wonderful stuff
and comparatively new, too, which is perhaps why the renais-
sance of Souths writing coincided with these last few decades of
the machine age. If Faulkner had written in theTSSOs he would
have been writing, no doubt, safely within the tradition, but his
novels would have been genteel novels, like those of George
Washington Cable or Thomas Nelson Page. In fact, the modem
South is such powerful material that the author mns the danger
of capturing the local colour and feeling that’s enough. He gets so
bemused by decaying mansions that he forgets to populate them
with people. I’m beginning to feel that it’s a good idea for writers
who come from the South, at least some of them, to break away
a little from all them magnolias.

Interviewers: You refer a number of times to Faulkner. Even
though you don’t think of yourself as a "Southern” writer, would
you say that he influenced you?

Styron: I would certainly say so. I’d say I had been influenced
as much, though, by Joyce and Flaubert. Old Joyce and Flaubert
have influenced me stylistically, given me arrows, but then a lot of
the contemporary works I’ve read have influenced me as a crafts-
man. Dos Passos, Scott Fitzgerald, both have been valuable in
teaching me how to write the novel, but not many of these modem
people have contributed much to my emotional climate. Joyce
comes closest, but the strong influences are out of the past — ^the
Bible, Marlowe, Blake, Shakespeare. As for Flaubert, Madame
Bovary is one of the few novels that moves me in every way, not
only in its style, but in its total communicability, hke the effect of
good poetry. What I really mean is that a great book should leave
you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.
Ydh live several lives while reading it. Its writer should, too. With-
out condescending, he should be conscious of himself as a reader,
and while he’s writing it he should be able to step outside of it
from time to time and say to himself, “Now, if I were just reading
this book, would I like this part here?” I have the feeling that
that’s what Flaubert did — maybe too much, though, finally, in
books like Sentimental Education.

Interviewers: While we’re skirting this question, do you think

246 WBITERS AT WORK

Faulkner’s experiments with time in The S(yind and the Fury are
justified?

Styron: Justified? Yes, I do.

Interviewers: Successful, then?

Styron; No, I don’t think so. Faulkner doesn’t give enough help
to the reader. I’m all for the complexity of Faulldier, but not for
the confusion. That goes for Joyce, too. All that fabulously beauti-
ful poetry in the last part of Finnegans Wake is pretty much lost
to the world simply because not many people are ever going to
put up with the chaos that precedes it. As for The Sound and the
Fury, I think it succeeds in spite of itself. Faulkner often simply
stays too damn intense for too long a time. It ends up being great
stuff, somehow, though, and the marvel is how it could be so won-
derful being pitched for so long in that one high, prolonged,
delirious key.

Interviewers; Was the problem of time development acute in
the writing of Lie Down in Darkness?

Styron; Well, the book started with the man, Loftis, standing
at the station with the hearse, waiting for the body of his daughter
to arrive from up North. I wanted to give him density, but all the
tragedy in his life had happened in the past. So the problem was
to get into the past, and this man’s tragedy, without breaking the
story. It stumped me for a whole year. Then it finally occurred to
me to use separate moments in time, four or five long dramatic
scenes revolving around the daughter, Peyton, at different stages
in her life. The business of the progression of time seems to me
one of the most difficult problems a novelist has to cope with.

Interviewers: Did you prefigure the novel? How much was
planned when you started?

Styron: Very little. I knew about Loftis and all his domestic
troubles. I had the funeral. I had the girl in mind, and her suicide
in Harlem. I thought I knew why, too. But that’s all I had.

Interviewers: Did you start with emphasis on character®or
story?

Styron; Character, definitely. And by character I mean a person
drawn full-round, not a caricature. E. M. Forster refers to "flat”
and “round” characters. I try to make all of mine round. It takes
an extrovert like Dickens to make flat characters come alive. But
story as sujh has been neglected by today’s introverted writers.
Story and characters should grow together; I think I’m lucky so

WILLIAM STYRON

247

far in that in practic|lly everything I've tried to write these two
elements have grown together. They must, to give an impression
of life being lived, just because each man’s life is a story, if you’ll
pardon the ojich^. I used to spend a lot of time worrying over
word order* trying to create beautiful passages. 1 still believe in
the value of a Handsome style. I appreciate the sensibility which
can produce a nice turn of phrase, like Scott Fitzgerald. But I’m
not interested any more in turning out something shimmering and
impressionistic — Southern, if you will, full of word-pictures, damn
Dixie baby-talk, and that sort of thing. I guess I just get more and
more interested in people. And story.

Interviewers: Are your characters real-hfe or imaginary?

Styron: I don’t know if that’s answerable. I really think frankly,
though, that most of my characters come closer to being entirely
imaginary than the other way round. Maybe that’s because they
all seem to end up, finally, closer to being like myself than like
people I’ve actually observed. I sometimes feel that the characters
I’ve created ‘are not much more than sorts of projected facets of
myself, and I believe that a lot of fictional characters have been
created that way.

Interviewers: How far removed must you be from your subject
matter?

Styron: Pretty far. I don’t think people can write immediately,
and well, about an experience emotionally close to them. I have a
feeling, for example, that I w" n’t be able to write about all the
time I’ve spent in Europe until I get back to America.

Interviewers: Do you feel yourself to be in competition with
other writers?

Styron: No, I don’t. “Some of my best friends are writers.” In
America there seems to be an idea that writing is one big cat-and-
dog fight between the various practitioners of the craft. Got to
hole up in the woods. Me, I’m a farmer, I don’t know no writers.
HAe writers. That sort of thing. I think that just as in everything
else writers can be too cosy and cliquish and end up nervous and
incestuous and scratching each other’s backs. In London once I
was at a party where everything was so literary and famous and
intimate that if the place had suddenly been blown up by dyna-
mite it would have demolished the flower of British letters. But I
think that writers in the U.S. could stand a bit more of the attitude
that prevailed in France in the last century. Flaubert and Mau-

WRITERS AT WORK

248

passant, Victor Hugo and Musset, they didmt suffer from knowing
each other. Turgenev knew Gogol. Chekhov knew Tolstoi and
Andreiev, and Gorki knew all three. I think it was Henry James
who said of Hawthorne that he might have been even better than
he was if he had occasiohally communicated a little bit more with
others working at the same sort of thing. A lot of* this philosophy
of isolation in America is a dreary pose. I’m not advocating a
Writers’ Supper Club on Waverly Place, just for chums in the
business, or a union, or anything like that, but I do think that
writers in America might somehow benefit by the attitude that,
what the hell, were all in this together, instead of all my pals are
bartenders on Third Avenue. As a matter of fact, I do have a pal
who’s a bartender on Third Avenue, but he’s a part-time writer
on the side.

Interviewers; In general, what do you think of critics, since
they are a subject which must be close to a writer’s heart?

Styron: From the writers’ point of view, critics should be ig-
nored, although it’s hard not to do what they suggest. I think it’s
unfortunate to have critics for friends. Suppose you write some-
thing that stinks, what are they going to say in a review? Say it
stinks? So if they’re honest they do, and if you were friends you’re
still friends, but the knowledge of your lousy writing and their
articulate admission of it will be always something between the
two of you, like the knowledge between a man and his wife of
some shady adultery. I know very few critics, but I usually read
their reviews. Bad notices always give me a sense of humility, or
perhaps humiliation, even when there’s a tone of envy or sour
grapes or even ignorance in them, but they don’t help me much.
When Lie Down in Darkness came out, my home-town paper
scraped up the local literary figure to review the book, a guy
who’d written something on hydraulics, I think, and he came to
the conclusion that I was a decadent writer. Styron is a decadent
writer, he said, because he writes a line like "the sea sucking at
the shore,” when for that depraved bit he should have substituted
"the waves lapping at the shore.” Probably his hydraulic back-
ground. No, I’m afraid I don't think much of critics for the most
part, although I have to admit that some of them have so far
treated me quite kindly. Look, there’s only one person a writer
should listen to, pay any attention to. It’s not any damn critic. It’s
the reader. And that doesn’t mean any compromise or sell-out. The

WILLIAM STYBON

249

writer must criticize 4iis own work as a reader. Every day I pick
up the story or whatever it is I’ve been working on and read it
through. If I enjoy it as a reader then I know I’m getting along
all right.

Interviewers: In your pretace to the* lirst issue of this maga*
zine you speak *of there being signs in the air that this generation
can and will produce literature to rank with that of any other
generation. What are these signs? And do you consider yourself,
perhaps, a spokesman for this new generation?

Styron: What the hell is a spokesman, anyway? I hate the idea
of spokesmen. Everybody, especially the young ones in the writing
game jockeying into position to give a name for a generation. I
must confess that I was guilty of that in the preface, too. But don’t
you think it’s tiresome, really, all these so-called spokesmen trum-
peting around, elbowing one another out of the way to see who’ll
be the first to give a new and original name to twenty-five million
people: the Beat Generation, or the Silent Generation, and God
knows what-all? I think the damn generation should be let alone.
And that goes for the eternal idea of competition — whether the
team of new writers can beat the team of Dos Passos, Faulkner,
Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. As I read in a review not long ago,
by some fellow reviewing an knthology of new writing which had
just that sort of proprietary essay in it and which compared the
new writers with the ones of the twenties, the reviewer said, in
effect, what the hell, there’s plenty of Lebensraum and Liebes-
traum for everybody.

Interviewers: But you did say, in the preface, just what we
were speaking of — that this generation can and will

STi'RON (interrupting): Yes, can and will produce literature
equal to that of any other generation, especially that of the
twenties. It was probably rash to say, but I don’t see any reason to
recant. For instance, I think those “signs in the air” are apparent
from just three first novels, those being From Here to Eternity,
The Naked and the Dead, and Other Voices, Other Rooms. It’s
true that a first novel is far from a fair standard with which to
judge a writer’s potential future output, but aren’t those three
novels far superior to the first novels of Dos Passos, Faulkner, and
Fitzgerald? In fact I think one of those novels — The Naked and
the Dead — ^is so good by itself that it can stand up respectably
well with the mature work of any of those writers of the twenties.

WRITERS AT WORK

250

But there I go again, talking in competitioiS with the older boys.
Anyway, I think that a lot of the younger writers around today
are stuffed with talent. A lot of them, it’s true, are shameless and
terrible self -promoters — mainly the members of whl&t a friend of
mine calls "the fairy axis" — but they’ll drop by ^e wayside and
don’t count for much anyway. The others, including the ones I’ve
mentioned, plus people like Salinger and Carson McCuUers and
Hortense Calisher — ^ those have done, and will go on doing,
fine work, unless somebody drops an atom bomb on them, or they
get locked up in jail by Velde and that highly cultured crowd.

Interviewers: Speaking of atom bombs and Representative
Velde, among other such contemporary items, do you think — as
some people have been saying — that the young writer today
works at a greater disadvantage than those of preceding — uh —
generations?

Styhon: Hell no, I don’t. Writers ever since writing began have
had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one
word — ^life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithless-
ness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered
any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoev-
ski or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches
and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the
beginning of time, just like other people, has been afiBicted by
what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life’’ — ^you know,
colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one
sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life,
along with nice little delights that come along every now and then.
Dostoevski had them and Marlowe had them and we all have
them, and they’re a hell of a lot more invariable than nuclear
fission or the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. So is Love in-
variable, and Unrequited Love, and Death and Insult and
Hilarity. Mark Twain was as bafiled and appalled by Darwin’s
theories as anyone else, and those theories seemed as monstrous to
the Victorians as atomic energy, but he still wrote about river-
boats and old Hannibal, Missouri. No, I don’t think the writer
today is any worse off than at any other time. It’s true that in
Russia he might as well be dead and that in Youngstown, Ohio,
that famous police chief, whatever his name is, has taken to in-
specting and banning books. But in America he can still write
practically anything he pleases, so long as it isn’t libellous or

WILLIAM STYRON

251

pornographic. Also is America he certainly doesn’t have to starve,
and there are few writers so economically strapped that they can’t
turn out work regularly. In fact, a couple of young writers — and
good write^s*-are damn near millionaires.

Interviewers: Then you believe id success for a writer?
Financial, that is, as well as critical?

Styhon: I sure do. I certainly have sympathy for a writer who
hasn’t made enough to live comfortably— comfortably, I mean,
not necessarily lavishly — ^because I’ve been colossally impover-
ished at times, but impoverished writers remind me of Somerset
Maugham’s remark about multilingual people. He admired them,
he said, but did not find that their condition made them neces-
sarily wise.

Interviewers: But getting back to the original point — ^in Lie
Down in Darkness didn’t your heroine commit suicide on the day
the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima? This seems to us to
be a little bit more than fortuitous symbolism, and perhaps to
indicate a sense of that inescapable and overpowering despair of
our age which you just denied was our peculiar lot. ^

Styron: That was just gilding the lily. If I were writing the
same thing now I’d leave that out and have her jump on the
Fourth of July. Really, I’m not trying to be rosy about things like
the atom bomb and war and the failure of the Presbyterian
Church. Those things are awful. All I’m trying to say is that those
things don't alter one bit a writer’s fundamental problems, which
are Love, Requited and Unrequited, Insult, et cetera.

Interviewers: Then you believe that young writers today have
no cause to be morbid and depressing, which is a charge so often
levelled at them by the critics?

Styron: Certainly they do. They have a perfect right to be
anything they honestly are, but I’d like to risk saying that a great
deal of this morbidity and depression doesn’t aiise so much from
p^itical conditions, or the threat of war, or the atom bomb, as
from the terrific increase of the scientific knowledge which has
come to us about the human self — Freud, that is, abnormal psy-
chology, and all the new psychiatric wisdom. My Cod, think of
how morbid and depressing Dostoevski would have been if he
could have gotten hold of some of the juicy work of Dr. Wilhelm
Stekel, say Sadism and Masochism. What people like John Web-
ster and, say, Hieronymus Bosch felt intuitively about some of the

WRITEBS AT WORK

252

keen horrors which lurk in the human mindr, we now have neatly
catalogued and clinically described by Krafft-Ebing and the
Meningers and Karen Homey, and they're available to any fifteen-
year-old with a pass-card to the New York Public Library. I don’t
say that this new knowledge is the cause of the so-called mor-
bidity and gloom, but 1 do think it has contributed to a new trend
towards the introspective in fiction. And when you get an emi-
nent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that
to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that
what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way
the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of some-
one's neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the
writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Interviewers: To sort of round this out, we’d like to ask finally
what might sound like a rather obvious question. That is, what
should be the purpose of a young writer? Should he, for instance,
be engagi, not concerned as much with the story aspects of the
novel as with the problems of the contemparary world?

Styron: It seems to me that only a great satirist can tackle the
world problems and articulate them. Most writers write simply out
of some strong interior need, and that I think is the answer. A
great writer, writing out of this need, will give substance to and
perhaps even explain all the problems of the world without even
knowing it, until a scholar comes along a hundred years after he’s
dead and digs up some symbols. The purpose of a young writer is
to write, and he shouldn’t drink too much. He shouldn’t think that
after he’s written one book he’s God Almighty and air all his
immature opinions in pompous interviews. Let’s have another
cognac and go up to Le Chapelain.

Peter Maitiiiessen

George Plimpton

Truman Capote

Truman Capote (Bom Truman Streckfus Persons ) was
brought up in the South, sent to school in Greenwich, Connecticut,
and until his stories began to be accepted held diverse jobs as a
moviescript reader, dancer on a river-boat, and an office boy for
The New Yorker.

At nineteen, he won an O. Henry prize for his short story
“Miriam,” and in won another' 6. Henry award for “Shut a
Final Door.” Random House published a collection of his short
stories (A Tree of Night)

In 1908 Capote won national attention with his first novel.
Other Voices, Other Rooms, a book elaborately furnished with the
grotesques of the Gothic tradition set against the backwound of
the Deep South. Carlos Baker wrote of the author’s method: “He
knows that in one condition of the human spirit the sound of a
voice may be epochal and the sense of something or someone
breathing behind the wall of another room can bring the listener
near the edge of cataclysm.”

A second novel. The Grass Harp, appeared in An adapta-
tion presented on Broadway in had an unsuccessful run,
tUbugh praised by Brooks Atkinson as "the most creative contribu-
tion of the season.” In 1904 Capote wrote the book for another
Broadway show, a lavish but not very successful musical based on
his short story, “The House of Flowers.”

Although Capote lives on Brooklyn Heights, he spends much of
the year travelling. He has written a travel book called Local
Color, describing his trips through the South, Portugal, and
France; in 1906 he recounted his experiences with the Porgy and
Bess troupe in Russia in the highly praised The Muses are Heard.

Truman Capote

Truman Capote lives in a big yellow house in Brooklyn Heights,
which he has recently restored with the taste and elegance that is
generally characteristic of his undertakings. As I entered he teas
head and shoulders inside a newly arrived crate containing a
wooden lion.

"Therer he cried as he tugged it out to a fine birth amid a
welter of sawdust and shavings. "Did you ever see anything so
splendid? Well, that’s that. I saw him and I bought him. Now he’s
all mine.’’

"He’s large," I said. "Where are you going to put him?’’

"Why, in the fireplace, of course,’’ said Capote. "Now come
along into the parlour while I get someone to clear away this
mess."

The parlour is Victorian character and contains Capote’s
most intimate collection of art objects and personal treasures,
which, for all their orderly arrangement on polished tables and
bamboo bookcases, somehow remind you of the contents of a very
astute little boy’s pockets. There is, for instance, a golden Easter
egg brought back from Russia, an iron dog, somewhat the worse
for wear, a Fahergi pillbox, some marbles, blue ceramic fruit,
paper-weights, Battersea boxes, picture postcards and old photo-
graphs. In short, everything that might seem useful or handy in a
day’s adventuring around the world.

Capote himself fits in very well with this impression at first
glance. He is small and blond, with a forelock that persists in fall-
ing down irdo his eyes, and his smile is sudden and sunny. His
approach to anyone new is one of open curiosity and friendliness.
He might be taken in by anything artd, in fact, seems only too
ready to be. There is something about him, though, that makes

255

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256

you feel that for all his willingness it would be hard w puu any
wool over his eyes and maybe it is better not to try.

There was a sound of scuffling in the hall and Capote came in,
preceded by a large bulldog with a white face.

"This is Buriky," he said.

Bunky sniffed me oiier and we sat down.

Interviewer: When did you ^jst start writing?

Capote: When I was a child of about ten or eleven and lived
near Mobile.

I had to go into town on Saturdays to the dentist and I joined
the Sunshine Club that was organized by the Mobile Press Regis*
ter. There was a children's page with contests for writing and for
colouring pictures, and then every Saturday afternoon they had a
party with free Nehi and Coca-Cola. The prize for the short-story
writing contest was either a pony or a dog, I’ve forgotten which,
but I wanted it badly. I had been noticing th^ activities of some
neighbours who were up to no good, so I wrote a kind of roman
d clef called “Old Mr. Busybody” and entered it in tlie contest.
The first instalment appeared one .Sunday, under my real name of
Truman Streckfus Persons. Only somebody suddenly realized that
I was serving up a local scandal as fiction, and the second instal-
ment never appeared. Naturally, I didn’t win a thing.

Interviewer; Were you sure then that you wanted to be a
writer?

Capote: I realized that I wanted to be a writer. But I wasn’t
sure I would be until I was fifteen or so. At that time I had
immodestly started sending stories to magazines and literary
quarterlies. Of course no writer ever forgets his first acceptance;
but one fine day, when I was seventeen, I had my first, second,
and third, all in the same morning's mail. Oh, I’m here to tell you,
dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase!

Interviewer: What did you first write?

Capote: Short stories. And my more unswerving ambitions sfill
revolve around this form. When seriously explored, the short story
seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose
writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe
entirely to my training in this medium.

Interviewer: What do you mean exactly by "control”?

Capote: I mean maintaining a stylistic and emotional upper
hand over your material. Call it precious and go to hell, but (

TRUMAN CAPOTE

257

believe a story can wredced by a faulty rhythm in a sentence —
especially if it occurs towards the end— or a mistake in paragraph-
ing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semi-
colon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of
view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrotfe a bad sentence. I don’t
mean to imply that I successfully practise what I pi’each. I try,
that’s alL

Interviewer: How does one arrive at short-story technique?

Capote: Since each story presents its own technical problems,
obviously one can’t generalize about them on a two-times-two-
equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply
to realize the most natural way of telling the story. TTie test of
whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story
is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does
it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final?
As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made
just right.

Interviewer: Are there devices one can use in improving one’s
technique?

Capote: Work is the only device I know of. Writing has laws of
perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music.
If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then re-
arrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme
disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses be-
cause he could write Dubliners. Too many writers seem to con-

✓

sider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well,
in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.

Interviewer: Did you have much encouragement in those
early days, and if so, by whom?

Capote;* Cood Lord! Tin afraid you’ve let yourself in for quite
a saga. The answer is a snake’s nest of no’s and a few yes’s. You
see, not altogether but by and large, my childhood was spent in
pfirts of the country and among people unprovided with any sem-
blance of a cultural attitude. Which was probably not a bad thing,
in the long view. It toughened me rather too soon to swim against
the current — ^indeed, in some areas I developed the muscles of a
veritable barracuda, especially in the art of dealing with one’s
enemies, an art no less necessary than knowing how to appreciate
one’s friends.

But to go back. Naturally, in the milieu aforesaid, I was thought

WRITERS AT WORK

258

somewhat eccentric, which was fair enough/ knd stupid, which 1
suitably resented. Still, I despised school — or schools, for I was
always changing from one to another — and year after year failed
the simplest subjects out of loathing and boredom. I played hooky
at least twice a week and was always running aw.'iy from home.
Once I ran away with a friend who lived across the street — a girl
much older than myself who in later life achieved a certain fame.
Because she murdered a half-dozen people and was eloctrocuted
at Sing Sing. Someone wrote a book about her. They called her
the Lonely Hearts Killer. But there. I’m wandering again. Well,
finally, I guess I was around twelve, the principal at the school I
was attending paid a call on my family, and told them that in his
opinion, and in the opinion of the faculty, I was “subnormal.” He
thought it would be sensible, the humane action, to send me to
some special school equipped to handle backward brats. What-
ever they may have privately felt, my family as a whole took
official umbrage, and in an effort to prove I wasn’t subnormal,
pronto packed me off to a psychiatric study clinic at a university in
the East where I had my I.Q. inspected. I enjoyed it thoroughly
and — guess what? — came home a genius, so proclaimed by
science. I don’t know who was the more appalled: my former
teachers, who refused to believe it, or my family, who didn’t want
to believe it — they’d just hoped to be told I was a nice normal
boy. Ha ha! But as for me, I was exceedingly pleased — went
around staring at myself in mirrors and sucking in my cheeks and
thinking over in my mind, my lad, you and Flaubert — or Maupas-
sant or Mansfield or Proust or Chekhov or Wolfe, whoever was
the idol of the moment.

I began writing in fearful earnest — my mind zoomed all night
every night, and I don’t think I really slept for several years. Not
until I discovered that whisky could relax me. I was too young,
fifteen, to buy it myself, but I had a few older friends who we^;e
most obliging in this respect and I soon accumulated a suitcase
full of bottles, everything from blackberry brandy to bourbon. I
kept the suitcase hidden in a closet. Most of my drinking was done
in the late afternoon; then I’d chew a handful of Sen Sen and go
down to dinner, where my behaviour, my glazed silences, gradu-
ally grew into a source of general consternation. One of my rela-
tives used to say, “Really, if I didn’t know better. I’d swear he was
dead drunk.” Well, of course, this little comedy, if such it was.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

259

ended in discovery i^nd some disaster, and it was many a moon
before 1 touched another drop. But I seem to be off the track
again. You asked about encouragement. The first person who ever
really helped me was, strangely, a teacher. An English teacher I
had in high school, Catherine Wood, who backed my ambitions in
every way, anfl to whom I shall always be grateful. Later on, from
the time 1 first began to publish, I had all the entouragement any-
one could ever want, notably from Margarita Smith, fiction editor
of Mademoiselle, Mary Louise Aswell of Harpers Bazaar, and
Robert Linscott of Random House. You would have to be a
glutton indeed to ask for more good luck and fortune than I had
at the beginning of my career.

Interviewer: Did the three editors you mention encourage you
simply by buying your work, or did they offer criticism, too?

Capote: Well, I can’t imagine anything more encouraging than
having someone buy your work. I never write — indeed, am physi-
cally incapable of writing — anything that I don’t think will be
paid for. But, as a matter of fact, the persons mentioned, and some
others as well, were all very generous with advice.

Interviewer: Do you like an)'thing you wrote long ago as well
as what you write now?

Capote: Yes. For instance, last summer I read my novel Other
Voices, Other Rooms for the first time since it was published
eight years ago, and it was quite as though I were reading some-
thing by a stranger. The truai is, I am a stranger to that book;
the person who wrote it seems to have so little in common with
my present self. Our mentalities, our interior temperatures, are
entirely different. Despite awkwardness, it has an amazing inten-
sity, a real voltage. I am very pleased I was able to write the book
when I did, otherwise it would never have been written. I like
The Grass Harp too, and several of my short stories, though not
"Miriam,” which is a good stunt but nothing more. No, I prefer
’’Children on Their Birthdays” and “Shut a Final Door,” and oh,
some others, especially a story not too many people seemed to
care for, “Master Misery,” which was in my collection A Tree of
Night.

Interviewer: You recently published a book about the Porgy
and Bess trip to Russia. One of the most interesting things about
the style was its unusual detadiment, even by comparison to the
reporting of journalists who have spent many years recording

WRITERS AT WORK

260

events in an impartial way. One had the rmpression that this
version must have been as close to the truth as it is possible to get
through another person s eyes, which is surprising when you con-
sider that most of your work has been characterized by its very
personal quality.

Capote: Actually, I don’t consider the style of this book. The
Muses Are Heard, as markedly different from my fictional style.
Perhaps the content, the fact that it is about real events, makes it
seem so. After all. Muses is straight reporting, and in reporting
one is occupied with literalness and surfaces, with implication
without comment — one can’t achieve immediate depths the way
one may in fiction. However, one of the reasons I’ve wanted to do
reportage was to prove that I could apply my style to the realities
of journalism. But 1 believe my fictional method is equally de-
tached— emotionality makes me lose writing control: I have to
e.xhaust the emotion before I feel clinical enough to analyse and
project it, and as far as I’m concerned that’s one of the laws of
achieving true technique. If my fiction seems more personal it is
because it depends on the artist’s most personal and revealing
area: his imagination.

I.N'TERVTEWER: How do you exhaust the emotion? Is it only a
matter of thinking about the story over a certain length of time, or
are there other considerations?

C.\poTE; No, I don’t think it is merely a matter of time. Suppose
you ate nothing but apples for a week. Unquestionably you would
exhaust your appetite for apples and most certainly know what
they taste like. By the time I write a story I may no longer have
any hunger for it, but I feel that I thoroughly know its flavour. The
Porgy and Bess articles are not relevant to this issue. That was
reporting, and “emotions” were not much involved — ai least not
the difficult and personal territories of feeling that I mean. I seem
to remember reading that Dickens, as he wrote, choked with
laughter over his own humour and dripped tears all over the pa^e
when one of his characters died. My own theory is that the writer
should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long
before setting out to evoke similar reactions in a reader. In other
words, I believe the greatest intensity in art in all its shapes is
achieved with a deliberate, hard, and cool head. For example,
Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. A warm story, warmly written; but it
could only be the work of an artist muchly aware of true tech-

TRUMAN CAPOTE 261

niques, i.e., necessities. I’m sure, at some point, Flaubert must
have felt the story very deeply— but not when he wrote it. Or,
for a more contemporary example, take that marvellous short
novel of Katherine Anne Porter s. Noon Wine. It has such inten-
sity, such* a sense of happening-now, yet the writing is so con-
trolled, the inifer rhythms of the story are so immaculate, that I feel
fairly certain Miss Porter was at some distance ‘from her material.

Interviewer: Have your best stories or books been written at
a comparatively tranquil moment in your life or do you work
better because, or in spite, of emotional stress?

Capote; I feel slightly as though I’ve never lived a tranquil
moment, unless you count what an occasional Nembutal in’duces.
Though, come to think of it, I spent two years in a very romantic
house on top of a mountain in Sicily, and I guess this period could
be called tranquil. God knows, it was quiet. That’s where I wrote
The Grass Harp. But I must say an iota of stress, striving towards
deadlines, does me good.

Interviewer; You have lived abroad for the last eight years.
Why did you decide to return to America?

Capote; Because I’m an American, and never could be, and
have no desire to be, anything else. Besides, I like cities, and New
York is the only real city-city. Except for a two-year stretch, I
came back to America every one of those eight years, and I never
entertained expatriate notions. For me, Europe was a method of
acquiring perspective and an education, a stepping-stone towards
maturity. But there is the law of diminishing returns, and about
two years ago it began to set in: Europe had given me an
enormous lot, but suddenly I felt as though the process were
reversing itself — there seemed to be a taking away. So I came
home, feeding quite grown up and able to settle down where I
belong — which doesn’t mean I’ve bought a rocking chair and
turned to stone. No indeed. I intend to have footloose escapades
af long as frontiers stay open.

Interviewer: Do you read a great deal?

Capote: Too much. And anything, including labels and recipes
and advertisements. I have a passion for newspapers — ^read all
the New York dailies every day, and the Sunday editions, and
several foreign magazines too. The ones I don’t buy I read stand-
ing at news stands. I average about five books a week — ^the
normal-length novel takes me about, two hours. I enjoy thrillers

WRITERS AT WORK

262

and would like some day to write one. Though I prefer first-rate
fiction, for the last few years my reading seems to have been con-
centrated on letters and journals and biographies. It doesn’t bother
me to read while 1 am writing — I mean, I don’t suddenly find
another writer's style seeping out of my pen. Though onc'e, during
a lengthy spell of James, my own sentences did get awfully long.

Interviewer: What writers have influenced you the most?

Capote: So far as I consciously know, I’ve never been aware of
direct literary influence, though several critics have informed me
that my early works owe a debt to Faulkner and Welty and
McCullers. Possibly. I’m a great admirer of all three; and Kath-
erine Anne Porter, too. Though I don’t think, when really exam-
ined, that they have much in common with each other, or me,
except that we were all bom in the South. Between thirteen and
sixteen are the ideal if not the only ages for succumbing to
Thomas Wolfe — he seemed to me a great genius then, and still
does, though I can’t read a line of it now. Just as other youthful
flames have guttered: Poe, Dickens, Stevenson. I love them in
memory, but find them unreadable. These are the enthusiasms
that remain constant: Flaubert, Turgenev, Chekhov, Jane Austen,
James, E. M. Forster, Maupassant, Rilke, Proust, Shaw, Willa
Cather— oh the list is too long, so I’ll end with James Agee, a
beautiful writer whose death over two years ago was a real loss.
Agee’s work, by the way, was much influenced by the films. I think
most of the younger writers have learned and borrowed from the
visual, structural side of movie technique. I have.

Interviewer: You’ve written for the films, haven’t you? What
was that like?

Capote: A lark. At least the one picture I wrote, Beat the Devil,
was tremendous fun. I worked on it with John Huston while the
picture was actually being made on location in Italy. Sometimes
scenes that were just about to be shot were written right on the
set. The cast were completely bewildered — sometimes evo.i
Huston didn’t seem to know what was going on. Naturally the
scenes had to be written out of a sequence, and there were
peculiar movements when I was carrying around in my head the
only real outline of the so-called plot. You never saw it? Oh, you
should. It’s a marvellous joke. Though I’m afraid the producer
didn’t laugh. 'The hell with them. Whenever there’s a revival I
go to see it and have a fine time.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

263

Seriously, thought I don’t think a writer stands much chance of
imposing himself on a film unless he works in the warmest rapport
with the director or is himself the director. It’s so much a director’s
medium that the movies have developed only one writer who,
working exclusively as a scenarist, could be called a film gem'us.
I mean that shy, delightful little peasant, Zavattini. What a visual
sensei Eighty per cent of the good Italian movies were made from
Zavattini scripts — all of the De Sica pictures, for instance. De Sica
is a charming man, a gifted and deeply sophisticated person;
nevertheless he’s mostly a megaphone for Zavattini, his pictures
are absolutely Zavattini’s creations: every nuance, mood, evpry bit
of business is clearly indicated in Zavattini’s scripts.

Interviewer: What are some of your writing habits? Do you
use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

Capote: I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think un-
less I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and
with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sip-
ping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to
sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the begin-
ning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). 'Then I do a
complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself
as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the
placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of
this sort, and the time I taw.e over them, irritate me beyond
endurance.

Interviewer: You seem to make a distinction between writers
who are stylists and writers who aren’t. Which writers would you
call stylists and which not?

Capote:^ What is style? And “what” as the Zen Koan asks,- “is
the sound of one hand?” No one really knows; yet either you know
or you' don’t. For myself, if you will excuse a rather cheap little
igiage, 1 suppose style is the mirror of an artist’s sensibility —
more so than the content of his work. To some degree all writers
have style — Ronald Firbank, bless his heart, had little else, and
thank God he realized it. But the possession of style, a style, is
often a hindrance, a negative force, not as it should be, and as it
is — ^with, say, E. M. Forster and Colette and Flaubert and Mark
Twain and Hemingway and Isak Dinesen — r reinforcement.
Dreiser, for instance, has a style — ^but oh, Dio huonol And Eugene
O’Neill. And Faulkner, brilliant as 'he is. They all seem to me

WRITERS AT WORE

264

triumphs over strong but negative styles, styles that do not really
add to the communication between writer and reader. Then there
is the styleless stylist — ^which is very difficult, very admirable, and
always very popular: Graham Greene, Maugham, Thornton Wilder,
John Hersey, Willa Gather, Thurber, Sartre (remember, we’re not
discussing content), J. P. Marquand, and so on. But yes, there is
such an animal as a non-stylist. Only they’re not writers; they’re
typists. Sweaty typists blacking up pounds of bond paper with
formless, eyeless, earless messages. Well, who are some of the
younger writers who seem to know that style exists? P. H.
Newby, Fran9oise Sagan, somewhat. Bill Styron, Flannery O’Con-
nor— she has some fine moments, that girl. James Merrill. William
Goyen — if he’d stop being hysterical. J. D. Salinger — especially in
the colloquial tradition. Colin Wilson? Another t^ist.

Interviewer: You say that Ronald Firbank had little else but
style. Do you think that style alone can make a writer a great
one?

Capote: No, I don’t think so— though, it could be argued, what
happens to Proust if you separate him from his style? Style has
never been a strong point with American writers. This though some
of the best have been Americans. Hawthorne got us off to a fine
start. For the past thirty years Hemingway, stylistically speaking,
has influenced more writers on a world scale than anyone else.
At the moment, I think our own Miss Porter knows as w^ as
anyone what it’s all about.

Interviewer: Can a writer learn style?

Capote: No, I don’t think that style is consciously arrived at,
any more than one arrives at the colour of one’s eyes. After all,
your style is you. At the end the personality of a writer has so
much to do with the work. The personality has to bt humanly
there. Personality is a debased word, I know, but it’s what I mean.
The writer’s individual humanity, his word or gesture towards the
world, has to appear almost like a character that makes conta&t
with the reader. If the personality is vague or confused or merely
literary, ga ne va pas. Faulkner, McCullers — ^they project their
personality at once.

Interviewer: It is interesting that your work has been so widely
appreciated in France. Do you think style can be translated?

Capote: Why not? Provided the author and the translator are
artistic twins.

TRUMAN CAPOTE 265

Interviewer: Fm afraid I interrupted you with your short

story still in pencilled manuscript. What happens next?

Capote: Let's see, that was second draft. Then I type a third
draft on ypflow paper, a very special ce^n kind of yellow paper.
No, I don’t g^t out of bed to do this. I balance the machine on
my knees. Sure, it works fine; I can manage a^ hundred words a
minute. Well, when the yellow draft is finished, I put the manu-
script away for a while, a week, a month, sometimes longer. When
1 take it out again, I read it as coldly as possible, then read it aloud
to a friend or two, and decide what changes 1 want to make and
whether or not I want to publish it. I’ve thrown away rather
a few short stories, an entire novel, and half of another. But
if all goes well, I type the final version on white paper and that’s
that.

Interviewer: Is the book organized completely in your head
before you begin it or does it unfold, surprising you as you go
along?

Capote: Both. I invariably have the illusion that the whole play
of a story, its start and middle and finish, occurs in my mind
simultaneously — that I’m seeing it in one flash. But in the working-
out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, be-
cause the surprise, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right
moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, tiiat jo)^l
little push that keeps a writer going.

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories.
But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagina-
tion. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then
you can’t forget it — it will haunt you till it’s written.

Interviewer: How much of your work is autobiographical?

Capote^ Very little, really. A little is suggested by real incidents
or personages, although everything a writer writes is in some way
autobiographical. The Grass Harp is the only true thing I ever
wrote, and naturally everybody thought it all invented, and
imagined Other Voices, Other Rooms to be autobiographical.

Interviewer: Do you have any definite ideas or projects for
the future?

Capote (meditatively): Well, yes, I believe so. 1 have always
written what was easiest for me until now: I want to try something
else, a kind of controlled extravagance. I want to use my mind
more, use many more colours. Hemingway once said anybody can

266 WRITERS AT WORK

write a novel in the first person. I know n|»w exactly what he
means.

Interviewer: Were you ever tempted by any of the other arts?

Capote: I don’t know if it’s art, but I was stage-stnick for years
and more than anything I wanted to be a tap-dancer! I used to
practise my - buck-and-wing until everybody in (he house was
ready to kill me. Later on, I longed to play the guitar and sing in
night clubs. So 1 saved up for a guitar and took lessons for one
whole winter, but in the end the only tune I could really play was
a beginner’s thing called “I Wish I Were Single Again.” I got so
tired of it that one day I just gave the guitar to a stranger in a bus
station. I was also interested in painting, and studied for three
years, but I’m afraid the fervour, la vrai chose, wasn’t there.

Interviewer: Do you think criticism helps any?

Capote: Before publication, and if provided by persons whose
judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after some-
thing is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything
less is a bore, and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you produced a
writer who can honestly say he was ever helped by the prissy
carpings and condescensions of reviewers. I don’t mean to say
that none of the professional critics are worth paying attention to
— but few of the good ones review on a regular basis. Most of all, I
believe in hardening yourself against opinion. I’ve had, and con-
tinue to receive, my full share of abuse, some of it extremely per-
sonal, but it doesn’t faze me any more. I can read the most out-
rageous libel about myself and never skip a pulsebeat. And in this
connection there is one piece of advice I strongly urge: never
demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those
letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.

Interviewer: What are some of your personal quirks?

Capote: I suppose my superstitiousness could be termed a
quirk. I have to add up all numbers: there are some people I never
telephone because their number adds up to an unlucky figure. &r
I won’t accept a hotel room for the same reason. I will not tolerate
the presence of yellow roses — ^which is sad because they’re my
favourite flower. I can’t allow three cigarette butts in the same
ash-tray. Won’t travel on a plane with two nuns. Won’t begin or
end anything on a Friday. It’s endless, the things I can’t and won’t.
But I derive some curious comfort from obeying these primitive
concepts.

TRUMAN CAPOTE 267

Interviewer: Yo!^ have been quoted as saying your preferred
pastimes are "conversation, reading, travel, and writing, in that
order.” Do you mean that literally?

Capote; T think so. At least I’m pre^ sure conversation will
always come ^st with me. 1 like to listen, and I, like to talk.
Heavens, girl, can’t you see I like to talk?

Pati Hill

Francoise Sagan

Francoise Sagan is the nom de plume of Francoise Quoirez. She
derived her name from Proust’s favourite author, the Princesse de
Sagan. The daughter of a prosperous engineer of Spanish extrac-
tion, Mademoiselle Sagan was bom in the little town of
Cajac in the Department of Lot and was brought up with her
brother and sister in the upper-middle-class quarter of Paris which
borders on the Parc Monceau. After being graduated from a Paris
school, she entered the Sorbonne in . In July, at the end of the
school year, she failed her examinations and started work on
Bonjour tristesse. The book was finished by the end of August,
was published by Editions Juillard and ' ' was awarded the
Prix des Critiques for that year. Immediately a success, Bonjour
tristesse sold over 700,000 copies in France and was translated into
fourteen languages. It was followed in by Un certain sourire
(A Certairf Smile). Darts un mois, dans un an (Those without
Shadows) was published • In America her &st two books
have sold more than two million copies. In addition to her novels.
Mademoiselle Sagan has written lyrics for the singer Juliette
Greco, moviescripts, and a commentary for a collection of photo-
graphs of New York City. She lives in a Paris apartment and often
works alone in the country outside the city.

In the spring > ' she was nearly killed in a sports-car crash.
Sports cars are her hobby; a bare foot on the accelerator, she
drives at speeds so reckless that European press reports on her
driving have been about as voluminous as the critiques of her
writing.

Francoise Sagan

Frangoise Sagan now lives in a smdU and modem ground-floor
apartment of her own on the Rue de Crenelle, where she is busily
writing a film script and some song lyrics as well as a new novel.
But when she was interviewed early last spring fust before the
publication of Un certain sourire, she lived across the city in her
parents' apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes in a neighbour-
hood which is a stronghold of the well-to-do French bourgeoisie.
She met the interviewers in the comfortably furnished living-room,
seated them in large chairs drawn up to a marble fireplace, and
offered them Scotch from a pint bottle which was unquestionably,
somehow, her own contribution to the larder. Her manner is shy,
but casual and friendly, and her gamine face crinkles easily into
an attractive, rather secret smile. She wore a simple black sweater
and grey skirt; if she is a vain girl the only indication of it was her
high-heeled shoes, .which were of elegantly worked light-grey
leather. She speaks in a high-pitched but quiet voice and she
clearly does not enjoy being interviewed or asked to articulate in
a formal xgay what are, to her, natural assumptions about her
writing. She is sincere and helpful, but questions which are
pompous or elaborate, or about personal life, cr which might be
interpreted as challenging her work, are liable to elicit only a
simple “oui” or “non,” or “je ne sais pas — ^je ne sais pas du tout” —
and then an amused, disconcerting smile.

Interviewers: How did you come to start Bonfour tristesse
when you were eighteen? Did you expect it would be published?

Sagan: I simply started it. I had a strong desire to write and
some free time. I said to myself, “This is the sort of enterprise
very, very little girls of my age devotp themselves to; IT! never be
able to finish it.” I wasn’t thinking about “literature” and literary

271

WRITERS AT WORK

272

problems, but about myself and whether I had the necessary will-
power.

Interviewers: Did you let it drop and then take it up again?

Sagan: No, I wanted passionately to finish it — I’ve nsjyer wanted
anything so much. While I was writing I thought there might be
a chance of itssbeing published. Finally, when it was done, I
thought it was hopeless. I was surprised by the book and by
myself.

Interviewers: Had you wanted to write for a long time before?

Sagan: Yes. I had read a lot of stories. It seemed to me impos-
sible not to want to write one. Instead of leaving for Chile with
a band of gangsters, one stays in Paris and writes a novel. That
seems to me the great adventure.

Intervievtehs: How quickly did it go? Had you thought out the
story in advance?

Sagan: For Bonfour tristesse all I started with was the idea of a
character, the girl, but nothing really came of it until my pen was
in hand. I have to start to write to have ideas. I wrote Bonjour
tristesse in two or three months, working two or three hours a day.
Un certain sourire was different. I made a number of little notes
and then thought about the book for two years. When I started in
writing, again two hours a day, it went very fast. When you make
a decision to write according to a set schedule and really stick to
it, you find yourself writing very fast. At least I do.

Interviewers: Do you spend much time revising the style?

Sagan: Very little.

Interviewers: Then the work on the two novels didn’t take
more than five or six months in all?

Sagan: Yes (smiling), it’s a good way to make a living.

Interviewers: You say the important thing at thL start is a
character?

Sagan: A character, or a few characters, and perhaps an idea for
a few of the scenes up to the middle of the book, but it all changes
in the writing. For me writing is a question of finding a certain
rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life
is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells
oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Interviewers: Do you draw on the people you know for your
characters?

Sagan: Tve tried very hard and Tve never found any resem-

FBANfOISB SAGAN 273

blance between the^eople I know and the people in my novels. I
don’t search for exactitude in portraying people. 1 try to give to
imaginary people a kind of veracity. It would bore me to death to
put into novels the people I know. It seems to me that there
are two kinds pf trickery: the “fronts” people assunre before one
another's eyes, and the “front” a writer puts on ^e face of reality.

Interviewebs: Then you think it is a form of cheating to take
directly from reality?

Sagan: Certainly. Art must take reality by surprise. It takes
those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment,
plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a
special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art
should not, it seems to me, pose the “real” as a preoccupation.
Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called “realist” novels —
they’re nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain
sensory truth — ^the true feeling of a character — ^that is all.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great
literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life
is amorphous, literature is formal.

Interviewebs: There are certain activities in life with highly
developed forms, for instance horse racing. Are the jockeys less
real because of that?

Sagan: People possessed by strong passions for their activities,
as jockeys may seem to be, don’t give me the impression of beiqg
very real. They often seem like characters in novels, but without
novels, like The Flying Dutchman.

Interviewers: Dd your characters stay in your mind after the
book is finished? What kind of judgments do you make about
them?

Sagan: When the book is finished I immediately lose interest in
the characters. And I never make moral judgments. All I would
sav is that a person was droll, or gay, or, above all, a bore. Making
judgments for or against my characters bores me enormously, it
doesn’t interest me at all. The only morality for a novelist is the
morality of his esthitique. I write the books, they come to an end,
and that’s all that concerns me.

Interviewers: When you finished Bonjour tristesse did it
undergo much revising by an editor?

Sagan: A number of general suggestions were made about the
first book. For example, there were seVeral versions of the ending

WRITERS AT WORK

274

and in one of them Anne didn’t die. Finally it r/as decided that the
book would be stronger in the version in which she did.

Interviewers: Did you learn anything from the published
criticism of the book?

Sagan: When the articles were agreeable I read thetn through.
I never learned aipything at all from them but I wai astonished by
their imagination and fecundity. They saw intentions I never had.

Interviewers: How do you feel novir' about Bonfour tristesse?

Sagan: I like Un certain sourire better, because it was more
difiScult. But I find Bonfour tristesse amusing because it recalls a
certain stage of my life. And I wouldn’t change a word. What’s
done Is done.

Interviewers: Why do you say Un certain sourire is a more
difficult book?

Sagan: I didn’t hold the same trump cards in writing the second
book: no seaside summer-vacation atmosphere, no intrigue naively
mounting to a climax, none of the gay cynicism of C6cile. And
then it was difficult simply because it was the second book.

Interviewers: Did you find it difficult to switch from the first
person of Bonfour tristesse to the third-person narrative of Un
certain sourire.

Sagan: Yes, it is harder, more limiting and disciplining. But I
wouldn’t make as much of that difficulty as some writers appar-
ently do.

Interviewers: What French writers do you admire and feel
important to you?

Sagan: Oh, I don’t know. Certainly Stendhal and Proust. I love
their mastery of the narrative, and in some ways I find myself in
definite need of them. For example, after Proust there are certain
things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off «^or you the
boundaries of your talent. He shows you the possibilities that lie
in the treatment of character.

Interviewers: What strikes you particularly about ProuS..’s
characters?

Sagan: Perhaps the things that one does not know about them
as much as the things one knows. For me, that is literature in the
very best sense: after all the long and slow analyses one is far
from knowing all the thoughts and facts and sides of Swann, for
example — and that is as it should be. One has no desire at all to
ask “Who was Swann?” To know who was Proust is quite enough.

FRANgOISB SAGAN 275

I don't know if thft’s dear: I mean to say that Swann belongs
completely to Proust and it is impossible to imagine a Balzadan
Swann, while one might well imagine a Proustian Marsay.

Interviewers: Is it possible that novels get written because the
novelist images hiinself in the role' of a novelist writing a
novel?

Sagan: No, one assumes the role of hero and then seeks out "the
novelist" who can write his stoiy.

Interviewers: And one always finds the same novelist?

Sagan: Essentially, yes. Very broadly, I think one writes and
rewrites the same book. I lead a character from book to book, I
continue along with the same ideas. Only the angle of vision, the
method, the lighting, change. Speaking very, very roughly, it
seems to me there are two kinds of novels — ^there is that much
choice. There are those which simply tell a story and sacrifice a
great deal to the telling — ^like the books of Benjamin Constant
which Bonjour tristesse and Un certain sourire resemble in con-
struction. And then there are those books which attempt to discuss
and probe the characters and events in the book — un roman ou
ton discute. The pitfalls of both are obvious: in the simple narra-
tive it often seems that the important questions are passed over.
In the longer classical novel the digressions can impair the effec-
tiveness.

Interviewers: Would you like to write "un roman ou ton
discute*'?

Sagan: Yes, I would like to write — in fact I’m now planning — a
novel with a larger oast of characters — there will be three heroines
— and with characters more diffuse and elastic than Dominique
and C6cile and the others in the first two books. The novel I
would like 4o write is one in which the hero would be freed from
the demands of the plot, freed from the novel itself and from the
author.

Interviewers: To what extent do you recognize your limits and
maintain a check on your ambitions?

Sagan: Well, that is a pretty disagreeable question, isn’t it? I
recognize limitations in the sense that I’ve read Tolstoi and
Dostoevski and Shakespeare. That’s the best answer, I think.
Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.

Interviewers: You’ve very quickly made a lot of money. Has it
changed your life? Do you make a distinction between writing

WRITERS AT WORK

276

novels for money and writing seriously, as oome American and
French writers do?

Sacan: Of course the success of the books has changed my life
somewhat because. I have a lot of money to spend if 1 wish, but
as far as my position in life is concerned, it hasn’t changed much.
Now I have a c£{ but I’ve always eaten steaks. You know, to have
a lot of money in one’s pocket is nice, but that’s all. The prospect
of making more or less money would never affect the way I write
— I write the bqoks, and if money appears afterwards, tant mieux
Mile Sagan interrupted the interviewers to say that she had tt
leave to work on a radio programme. She apologized and got w,
to go. It was difficult to believe, once she had stopped talking, that
the slight, engaging girl had, with a single book, reached more
readers than most novelists do in a lifetime. Rather, one would
have thought her a schoolgirl rushing offi to the Sorbonne as she
called down the apartment hall to her mother, "Au revoir, maman.
Je sors travailler mais je rentre de bonne heure.”

Blair Fuller

Robert B. Silvers

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